On Mar 29, 2007, at 10:37 PM, Stephen Smith wrote:

> So I have about a half million records in a non-standard, non- 
> delimited
> format. The fields are fixed widths, each record is separated by a  
> new line.

Here's another option:

 >> xs, ys, zs = "XXXYYYYYZZ".unpack("A3A5A2")
=> ["XXX", "YYYYY", "ZZ"]
 >> xs
=> "XXX"
 >> ys
=> "YYYYY"
 >> zs
=> "ZZ"

Hope that helps.

James Edward Gray II