format is rather old school Perl and there are many many other ways to achieve what you want. One possibility is to concatenated fixed width strings to a line until it is long enough:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $policy = <<POLICY;
To|that|end,
I|have|a
question|on|something
which|has|me
stumped.|I've|been
Googling|on|and
off|for|a
couple|of|days,
and|looking|over
previous|posts|and
examples|etc.|here
on|PM,|but
haven't|found|anything
which|(as|far
as|I|can
tell)|directly|relates
POLICY

my @UACS;
open my $fIn, '<', \$policy;

while (my $pol = <$fIn>) {
    chomp $pol;
    push @UACS, (split /\|/, $pol, -1)[2];
}

my $line;

while (@UACS) {
    $line .= sprintf '%-22s ', shift @UACS;

    next if length $line < 60;

    print "$line\n";
    $line = '';
}

print $line;

[download]

Prints:

end,                   a                      something              
me                     been                   and                    
a                      days,                  over                   
and                    here                   but                    
anything               far                    can                    
relates

[download]
True laziness is hard work

In reply to Re: Output an array of values in column format? by GrandFather
in thread Output an array of values in column format? by bobdabuilda

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