That's a fact! unpack may be intimidating at first, but if you're looking at fixed-width columns (as your examples seem to indicate), unpack is going to be faster than split. Consider split when you don't have fixed-width data, and unpack when you do.

Another advantage to unpack for fixed-width column data is that if one of the fields should be filled completely (leaving no whitespace at all), splitting on whitespace will fail, while unpack will still work fine.


Dave


"If I had my life to live over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein

In reply to Re: Re: Seeking best approach by davido
in thread Seeking best approach to column parsing by vivapl

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