You are going to have to parse the data and put them into columns. This basic idea has been described above by other posters. One thing you might want to consider is to avoid the printf() call by using a format. Read perlform if this doesn't mean anything to you. formats were a big deal in the early days for perl, and are fairly powerful when dealing with columnar data. They've fallen out of vogue in the past decade, but might be the right tool for this particular problem.

- doug