You could use unpack for this, but I'm always leery of it, since one badly formatted or partial record will abort your script.

Using a regex, this is pretty straightforward: 

# you can name your arrays a,b,c,d,e if you want to,
# but I won't
my (@jobNumbers, @customerNames, @telephoneNumbers,
    @agencyReferences, @statusDescriptions);

# assuming you're reading from STDIN, or
# files named on the command line...
while(<>) {
   if(!/
        (.{6}) # job number, $1
        (.{10}) # customer name, $2
        (.{10}) # telephone number, $3
        (.{10}) # agency reference, $4
        (.{64}) # status description, $5, adjust to skip spaces
      /x) # allow comments and whitespace in regex
   { 
       warn "Skipping badly formatted record '$_'";
       next;
   }
   push @jobNumbers, $1;
   push @customerNames, $2;
   push @telephoneNumber, $3;
   push @agencyReferences, $4;
   push @statusDescriptions, $5;
}

[download]
This way, you can change each "subsection" of the regex to do more validation on your input.

Another alternative, which would (probably) be much faster, would be to use substr. 

# same arrays as above
while(<>) {
    if(length<101) { # 1 more for newline
         chomp;
         warn "Record '$_' too short, skipping";
         next;
    }
    push @jobNumbers, substr $_,0,6;
    push @customerNames, substr $_,6,10;
    push @telephoneNumbers, substr $_,16,10;
    push @agencyReferences, substr $_,26,10;
    # adjust either start or end if you need to skip spaces
    push @statusDescriptions, substr $_,36,64;
}

[download]
Hmmm, wait a sec, this feels like homework... Oh, the heck with it, I've already done all this typing :)
--
Mike

Edit: Hmmm, why'd I think unpack will crash on bad input? The docs don't support that theory... Maybe that was old old old behaviour?

In reply to Re: extract part of line by RMGir
in thread extract part of line by jdawes

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