And a fairly simple regex can insert your commas. Re-reverse your result, and there you go.

Update: here's my attempt that appears to do what you want:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $test="Bob Q Smith bsmith 00001234567 5/1/00 12:00:00";
$test = reverse $test;
#documenting the simple but nasty looking regex is left as an exercise
+ for the reader
$test=~s/([:\d]+)\s([\d\/]+)\s([\d]+)\s([\w]+)\s(.*)/$1,$2,$3,$4,$5/ o
+r die "Pattern didn't match: $test";
$test = reverse $test;

print $test;
[download]

my $testvar = "Bob Q Smith bsmith 00001234567 5/1/00 12:00:00";

$testvar =~ s/
              \s           # a whitespace character (space, tab, etc)
              (            # Capture to $1
                \w+        #    one or more word characters (e.g. bsmi
+th)
              )
              \s           # a whitespace character
              (            # Capture to $2
                \d+        #    one or more digits
              )
              \s           # a whitespace character
            /,$1,$2,/x;
[download]

Cheers,
Ovid

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Nice one as that works on names with zero or more middle initials, and isn't bothered by capitalized usernames either (as my quick attempt was).

Than the first thing you need to do is write something to clean up the data. Maybe throw the cleaned data into and array, run the regex on that and then output those results to a file...

Maybe if you could change the input so it comes as something like:

Bob Q Smith 00001234567 bsmith 5/1/00 12:00:00

It would make it much easier then to use regexes to catch the spaces that fall between number and letter fields. I think this goes under the "it would be easier to control the input if you can" department.

-- I'm a solipsist, and so is everyone else. (think about it)