Today is a great day for perl. The most significant module to ever grace cpan has been uploaded. It is my pleasure to announce DataExtract::FixedWidth. Finally a sexy way to deal with "databases" that were coughed out of applications that suck. This module does not suck. It rocks. It pwns. It is l33t.

It was written using Moose by the coolest mofo around. He rocks. Check it out and give me feedback plz. Thanks.

UPDATE: This module is an attempt at a full fledged out-of-the-box solution to fixed-column-width tables. These types of tables are often outputted by ghostscript or a tab separated file that went through some sort of unexpanded. Humans deal with this better because we can look at the table as a whole simply. This module makes this form of data infinitely more user-friendly. etc.

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.