There's probably better/more efficient ways to do this, but this might do what you are asking. I'm not sure because your question isn't real clear. This snippet will tab delimit the data after replacing the comma's and truncating the end spaces in the second (pos 15-25) field. In the future it is in your best interest to provide a clearer explaination and an exact representation of the data you want to parse. People will help you here, but you need to do your part also. 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @data = ('client-up-to-,Doe,Smith , Inc, jwaters,pfloyd,jjoplin');

foreach my $line (@data) {
    chomp $line;
    my $beg_line = substr($line, 0, 14);
    my $name_field = substr($line, 14, 10);
    my $end_line = substr($line, 25);
    print "B: ~$name_field~\n";
    $name_field =~ tr/,/ /;
    $name_field =~ s/\s*$//;
    print "A: ~$name_field~\n";
    $line = "${beg_line}${name_field}${end_line}";
    $line =~ tr/,/\t/;
    print "~$line~\n";
}

__END__
B: ~Doe,Smith ~ #note space is still in at this point
A: ~Doe Smith~
~client-up-to-    Doe Smith Inc     jwaters    pfloyd    jjoplin~

[download]


-THRAK
www.polarlava.com

In reply to Re: Help with substitution - - 15 Characters from the left by THRAK
in thread Help with substitution - - 15 Characters from the left by La12

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