Monks,

I have some very large ugly data files with irregularly delimited (or non-delimited) elements. The files look like this: 

Bob's Company   VA chickens and cows April 23, 2003 2365
Elizabeth P. Jones Inc.WY   widgets  February 4, 2003 4
Big Huge CorporationUSAserversworkstationsrouters April 17, 2003 99999

[download]
After some manipulations I've been able to parse based on
two or more whitespaces: 
while (<READFILE>) {
      chomp;
      @columns = split/\s{2,}/g, $_, 7;
}

[download]
I was wondering if anyone can think of a better way to do this. It took a great deal of work to reliably insert two or more whitespaces between valid data elements. Also, the files are quite large, and what if I wasn't assured of having a fixed number of elements?

Edit by tye, remove BR tags, use CODE tags so extra spaces are visible

In reply to Parsing irregularly delimited data by space_cadet

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