You have to read all the way to the last paragraph of perlform

Within strings that are to be displayed in a fixed length text field, each control character is substituted by a space. (But remember the special meaning of "\r" when using fill mode.) This is done to avoid misalignment when control characters "disappear" on some output media.

It works just fine with a variable length field, but that's probably not very useful for you...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $Status="\033[32mSTATUS\033[0m";
my $ms = 6;
my $count = 42;

format STDOUT =
^<<<<< ^<<<<<   @*
$ms, $count, $Status
.
write STDOUT;
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My advice: If you are dealing with a single line format, just use sprintf instead.

UPDATE: Actualy your "data" probably doesn't have control characters in it right? you're just trying to shove control characters into it -- what you relaly want is for your format to have control characters in it. While that's not possible, you can use variable width fields that you know will always get filled with 0 length values (which just happen to be control characters...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $Status="STATUS";
my $ms = 6;
my $count = 42;

my $START_COLOR = "\033[32m";
my $CHANGE_COLOR = "\033[36m";
my $END_COLOR = "\033[0m";

format STDOUT =
^<<<<< @* ^<<<<<< @* ^<<<<<<<<<<<<< @*
$ms, $START_COLOR, $count, $CHANGE_COLOR, $Status, $END_COLOR
.
write STDOUT;
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The code you provide doesn't (can't) generate the output you suggest it does - at the very least the width of the last field doesn't allow the text '1.24ms' to be generated.

I'd use printf instead of format. Maybe something like:

use strict;
use warnings;

my $status = 'frst';
my $element = 'tyr';
my $Status = "\033[32m$status";
my $Element = "\033[36m$element";
my $ms = '0ms';
my $count = '1.24ms';

my $format = "        %-4s           %-18s             %-7s        %-3
+s\n";

printf $format, $Status, $element, $ms, $count;
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Prints:

        frst           tyr                            0ms        
+    1.24ms
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Note that there is an escape character before the first [

Thanks, printf works perfectly.

format OUT = 
^[@<<<<           ^[@<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<             ^[@<<<<<<<        
+@<<<<
$Status, $element, $ms, $count
.
$Status="[32m$Status";
...
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where ^[ is a literal chr(33).

update: corrected format declaration

_($_=" "x(1<<5)."?\n".q·/)Oo.  G°\        /
                              /\_¯/(q    /
----------------------------  \__(m.====·.(_("always off the crowd"))."·
");sub _{s./.($e="'Itrs `mnsgdq Gdbj O`qkdq")=~y/"-y/#-z/;$e.e && print}