Now, what if you have a string you want to break up. If it's nicely delimited, you can use split very nicely. But, what if it's positional?

If you have more than ten or twenty fields (whose format I usually cut 'n paste from some document), I find the explicit use of unpack unmanagable (e.g. adding/deleting, or changing the length of a field in the middle of the format is a pain, e.g. when there's a typo in the doc or the doc includes 'sub-fields' which are not obvious), and I like to use Parse::FixedLength, which for your example would be:

my $parser = Parse::FixedLength->new([qw(
  first:2
  second:4
  filler:4
  third:4
)]);
my $href = $parser->parse($line);
print "$href->{first}\n";
etc.

[download]

In reply to Re: Maintainable code is the best code Part II by runrig
in thread Maintainable code is the best code Part II by dragonchild

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.