#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
open (FILE1, "input.txt");
open (FILE2, ">output.txt");
while (<FILE1>)
{
        /^(.+?)\s{1,9}(.+?)\s{1,9}(.+?)$/;
        print FILE2 "$1,$2,$3\n";
}
close FILE2;
close FILE1;
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    while ($line = <FILE1>)
    {
        @fields = split / /, $line;
        $output = pop @fields;
        foreach $field (@fields)
        {
            $output = $output . ',' . $field;
        }
        print <FILE2> qq($output\n);
    }
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Indeed. But we can tidy up a bit:

while( <FILE> )
{
    split;
    print FILE2 join ',' , @_;
    print FILE2 "\n";
}
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Here you see that the perl shorthands improve readibility.

And this even compacts to (trading readability a bit):

print FILE2 join( ',', split )."\n" while <FILE>;

#or
use SuperSplit;
print FILE2 superjoin( ',', supersplit_open( $filename ) );
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Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)

Jeroen your solutions realy show the power of perl
As Sasquire was an "Initiate" I felt that my solution
was a little easier to follow

nice soultions everyone, but sadly not for this problem. You are all parsing space-seperated data, but Sasquires data ist in fixed-width fields.

If you've got just a few fixed-width fields, you might want to try substr. If you have many fields, I would recommend unpack, like so:

while(<DATA>)
        @data = unpack("A8A10A2",$_);
        print join(",", @data), "\n";
}

__DATA__
12345678123456789012
longone evenlongerha
a       b         c
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the template string "A8A10A2" tells unpack to look for 8 Ascii Characters, then 10 Ascii Characters, then 2 Ascii Characters. unpack is also used a lot in handling binary data (which I don't understand). I just stick to this usage.

--
Brigitte    'I never met a chocolate I didnt like'    Jellinek
http://www.horus.com/~bjelli/         http://perlwelt.horus.at

which in turn can be shortened to

print join(",",unpack("A8A10A2",$_)),"\n" while <DATA>;
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and run from the command line as

perl -i.bak -l -ne "print join(',',unpack('A8A10A2',$_));" filename
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this will do the conversion for you. I'm sure there's a module out there which parses comma delimited files into html tables. hope this helps

larryk

----------------------------------------------------
$less->{'chars'} = `"time in the pub" | more`; # :-D
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The module you're thinking of is Data::Table. From the docs:

$t = Data::Table::fromCSV("aaa.csv");  # Read a csv file into a table 
+oject
print $t->html;                        # Display a 'portrait' HTML TAB
+LE on web.
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buckaduck