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)