Hello everyone,

Scenario:

I have been given a comma delimited text file that I need to "clean-up" and convert into tab delimited. Easy enough if I use substitute to replace all commas with tabs, BUT in this file, there are company names that contain commas(nothin' is ever easy, is it?). For example the incoming text looks like:

client,ABC Company, jwilkens,jdoe,mdeart #this one is fine
client,Cornell,Thayil,Cameron & Sheppard, LLC, klivingston,amarison,pserton #this one is not
client,Doe,Smith & Randall, Inc, jwaters,pfloyd,jjoplin #this one is not

Now the one thing that is consistent (my example doesn't show this) is that the company names will always start at the 15th character from the left and end at the 25th character from the left. If a company name is shorter than 10 characters then spaces will be added to make it 10 characters.

My game plan is to 

$foo = entire string (say 100+ characters);
if {$foo contains a comma within the 15th thru 25th character from the
+ left then
     replace it with a "+";  #I can use any nonalpha character here
};
replace all commas in $foo with "\t"; #replace all commas with tabs
replace all "+" with commas; # replace all plus-signs with commas

[download]

My question is... How do I write the IF statement?
Also, someone wrote that this gets rid of empty spaces? If so, what does it substitute it with?

$foo =~ s/\s/\\g;

[download]
Thanks for your time.

In reply to Help with substitution - - 15 Characters from the left by La12

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