Mainframes often used fixed-width records and reports are actually files with (typically) 133 characters per record. However, the report itself is only 132 characters wide. The first character is called the "Carriage Control" and this tells the printer how to behave, but itself is not printed. The following table lists the carriage control codes you're likely to encounter:

If you want to replicate the structure of the report, you'll need to take these into account.

Cheers,
Ovid

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See, for example, http://www.nsc.liu.se/~boein/f77to90/asa.html:

ASA Carriage Control Characters

The first character in each record (line) of formatted output defines a carriage control character to the lineprinter, often called ASA-character, for a previous name of the US Standardization Organization ANSI. These have the following meanings

        blank     New line
        +         Not new line (overwriting, 
                  not available on all printers)
        0         Double line feed
        1         New page

That doesn't look like a "1", it is a "1". You need to strip the first character off from each line and use it to determine what type of CR and/or LF you should put before/after that record.

For us "old-timers" this was better known as CTLASA. Where CTL is for ConTroL and ASA the American Standards Association (now known as ANSI -- American National Standards Institute). CTLASA may turn up additional info if you should need to research the topic further.

@a=split??,'just lose the ego and get involved!';
for(split??,'afqtw{|~'){print $a[ord($_)-97]}

I assume you want to ditch this page break char. First you need to identify it, then you just sub it out. Here is a snippet to identify the chars in a string according to their octal escape code. Just cut and paste a snippet of your text that includes the escape char or similar to get a sample of it into a variable. In the example you can see the two "\n" chars - they are \012 in octal. Anyway once you identify the char code for this errant control char just stick it in the regex and it should be fixed.

$text = "Hello\nWorld\n";
for (split//,$text) {
   printf "\%03o\n", ord $_;
}

$text =~ s/\012/\n\n\n/;
print $text;
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cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print