Update: I thought I was just adding an additional note to the choir here, but.......evidently not as new requirements surfaced below.

I think Javafan has it in terms of brevity. But here is yet another way. I changed the data a bit in an attempt to cover more cases. Worthy of note here is that some solutions, mine included essentially just "throw away" the field length information. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my %xlatetype = ('$' => 'string',
                 '*' => 'number',
                 '%' => 'year',
                 );

my %results;

my $data = '0010$ADAM SMITH0003*3330004%19770004$BOB 0001*40004%1967';

my @tokens = split(/\d{4}([\$\*\%])/, $data);
shift @tokens;    #there is a "dead" field at the beginning   

while (@tokens)
{
    my ($type, $value) = splice(@tokens,0,2);
    my $type_text = $xlatetype{$type};
    push @{$results{$type_text}}, $value  
}

print Dumper \%results;

__END__
$VAR1 = {
          'number' => [
                        '333',
                        '4'
                      ],
          'string' => [
                        'ADAM SMITH',
                        'BOB '
                      ],
          'year' => [
                      '1977',
                      '1967'
                    ]
        };

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In reply to Re: Splitting file into separate files based on record lengths and identifiers by Marshall
in thread Splitting file into separate files based on record lengths and identifiers by monty77

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