On Sunday, October 12, 2003, 1:50:16 PM, Mike wrote:

> I have a line of text output in columnar form; what's the best way to split it
> into its requisite parts?

> Say I have lines of

> aaaaabbcccccddeee

> I can do something like:

> md = /(.....)(..)(.....)(..)(...)/.match(line);  # seems klugy somehow


I'm not sure what you mean by columns, given your example.  Columns,
to me, suggests columns in a newspaper.

But in your example, there's not much wrong with what you've done.  A
slight improvement is

data = /(.{5})(.{2})(.{5})(.{2})(.{3})/.match(line).captures

The reason I suggest this is that you can easily generalise it
(replace the literal numbers by variables) to accept different column
widths.

However, I suspect you had something more complicated in mind.

Gavin