Your issue here arises from the fact you are starting with a fixed-width file, not a white-space delimited file - the latter cannot contain a null column with its body by construction.

You can roll your own solution using substr or pack/unpack. However, it's probably a good idea to turn to CPAN and use one of the many fixed width parsing modules available (e.g. search terms fixedwidth, fixedlength).

Update: You reposted the problem outside this thread here. You shouldn't break threads unnecessarily, and you really shouldn't double post.