What's wrong with just counting the columns? Or are the column widths always changing? Then you will need to tell us how to tell one column from another.

Anyway, BrowserUk wrote Re: Fixed Position Column Records, which also creates the unpack template for you, which should solve your problem. Also see EvanCarrol's DataExtract::FixedWidth, which employs that code and wraps it with some more infrastructure.

So i need to know position (in the line) of each column.

There are various ways to understand your question. For example, it could mean that there are column markers like "<C>" (literally) in the first/header row, and you want to find where they occur on that line.  In that case, you could do something like

my $firstrow = "<S>                           <C>              <C>    
+   <C>        <C>       <C> <C>   <C>          <C>       <C>       <C
+>    <C>";

my @columnpos;

while ($firstrow =~ /(<\w>)/g) {
    push @columnpos, pos($firstrow) - length($1);
}
print "positions: @columnpos\n";
__END__
positions: 0 30 47 57 68 78 82 88 101 111 121 128
[download]

while ($firstrow =~ /(<\w>)/g) {
    push @columnpos, pos($firstrow) - length($1);
}
[download]

You could use a look-ahead to avoid doing the capture, length and subtraction.

push @columnpos, pos $firstrow while $firstrow =~ m{(?=<\w>)}g;
[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

Bah, count? I thought that was why we had computers . . .

perl -le 'print join ( "", map { " " x 9 . $_ } 1..8 ), "\n", "1234567
+890" x 8'
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Update: Fore (and putting it to use :) . . .

         1         2         3         4         5         6         7
+         8
1234567890123456789012345678901234567890123456789012345678901234567890
+1234567890
perl -le'print join("",map{" "x9 .$_}1..8),"\n","1234567890"x8'
ruby -e'puts (?1..?8).map{|x|" "*9<<x}.join+"\n"+"1234567890"*8'
[download]

Season to taste if you want 0-based or a longer ruler.

The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.
The cake is a lie.

Heh, it's been done before.

• another intruder with the mooring in the heart of the Perl

This produces the following output:

"ACACIA RESH CORP              ","ACACIA TCH COM   ","003881307 "," 11
+0,725   "," 1,875,000"," SHS","      "," SHARED-OTHER"," 1,2,3    ","
+ 1,875,000"," 0     "," 0"
[download]