I do not like the line where I replace $first with spaces. It really should be: 

  $first =~ s/./ /g;

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I love regular expressions! However, things can get easily out of hand and become unmaintainable. Also, these are quite format dependent. Should there be only one column, it would not work anymore.

In reply to Re^3: regex pattern match by hdb
in thread regex pattern match by reaper9187

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