Ok, from your clariification it sounds like you have a text database whose format was never really decided upon. I guess that a number of different ad hoc formats got appended.

Your best approach will probably be to try to characterize the different formats with regular expressions. Fixed length formats can be decoded with unpack, and delimited fields with split. It will take a certain amount of eyeball inspection to know you have detected all the formats. The trouble with ad hoc formats is that they usually are inadequate.

Once you can detect and decode the whole file, use one of the CSV modules to write to a single, capable, standard.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: ascii manipulation in perl by Zaxo
in thread ascii manipulation in perl by brkstr

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.