in reply to text parsing question

You may have to fix/fudge the LAST number, but this seems to be what you want:
$_=' ---------- ------------------------- -------- --- - ------------------------- ----- ---- ----------- -----------'; while( m/-\S.\s|$/g){ print pos() -1,qq(\n) }
OUTPUT:
13 40 50 56 83 90 96 109 121

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