Using split to separate fix-width data sounds like a terrible idea to me. While short data will be padded with whitespace, there's no garantee all data is short - a 6 character entry in a 6 character wide field will not be padded. Furthermore, since the data is fixed-width, there's no need to escape whitespace - there might be whitespace as data. In fact, what you think is padding might actually be part of the data!