The unix-style "cut" is portable -- you can find free ports of unix command line utils for ms-windows, and macosx is unix, and "cut" behaves the same everywhere. What more portability do you need?
I just had a silly idea : what about using something like Inline::C to integrate the part of the 'cut' utility you need to the script?

In reply to Re^2: cut vs split (suggestions) by wazoox
in thread cut vs split (suggestions) by sk

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