Oh. Just saw my name being used in this discussion and thought I should clear up a couple of things.

It's true that Data Munging with Perl promotes the decoupling of the input/munge/output stages of a data munging program. I really hope that no-one here would argue against that being a good idea.

I'm not sure, however, how that concept suddenly becomes an endorsement for Parse::FixedLength. I admit that I didn't know about the module when I was writing the book, but having now looked at the module I think that it makes things more complex than using plain pack and unpack.

So, yes, people do still have to deal with fixed width data (I'm currently working with data from IBM, so I should know!) but in my opinion using Perl built-ins is a better way of dealing with it than adding an new module into the process.

--
<http://www.dave.org.uk>

Perl Training in the UK <http://www.iterative-software.com>