The issue is that this is fixed-width data rather than delimited data. Rather than using split, you should be using unpack. For a rough intro to the utility, see perlpacktut. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my ($a, $b, $c, $d, $e, $f, $g, $h) = unpack "A34A14A15A27A57A28A4
+8", $_;
 # print data to get it ready to be inserted into db
    print "$a - $b - $c - $d - $e - $f - $g - $h\n";
}

__DATA__
2009122233388675647               9988230       2009-01-01     JOE DOE
+ JR                 JOEDOEJRWX@EMAIL.COM                             
+        COMPANY JOES C. LTD., CORP. 1900-01-01 00:00:00.000 1900-01-0
+1 00:00:00.000 
20091222333886756                 99882308K     2010-01-01     JOE DOE
+                    JOEDOEJRWX@TEST.COM                              
+        COMP INS  / CORP. LTDA      1900-01-01 00:00:00.000 1900-01-0
+1 00:00:00.000

[download]
Note that the above code issues warnings about an uninitialized value in a concatenation. This is because you expect 8 fields, but my unpack only has 7 fields encoded (A\d+). I suspect there is an additional field between e-mail and company, but have no way of knowing without a record that contains that information. Note as well you can drop the $_ from unpack's argument list with perl >= 5.10.

In reply to Re: Parsing text file Help! by kennethk
in thread Parsing text file Help! by Anonymous Monk

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