title: Perl Text Parsing - fixed delimeted structure is changing
body: <p>Perl Experts - My attempt to solve my problem is turning into a lot of code, which in PERL seems like I'm approaching this in-correctly. Here is my problem:</p>
  
  <p>I have a block of text (example below) which can have variable amount of whitespace between the column data. I was using a simple split, but the problem now is that the column "code" now contains spaces in the data (I only accounted for that in the last column). What seems to be constant (although I don't have access to, or control of the source structure) is that there is a minimum of 3 spaces between columns (maybe more, but never less).</p>
  
  <p>So, I'd like to say my column delimiter token is "3 spaces" and then trim the data within each to have my actual columnar data.</p>
  
  <pre><code>COL0   COL1   COL2   COL3         COL4   COL5
     -      4    0.2      1       416489   463455 554
            1    0.9      1           E1   
     0      3    1.4     14   E97-TEST 1   
     -      1   97.5    396         PASS   Good
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm just trying to get the values into 6 variables.</p>
  
  <p>NOTE: COL0 may not have a value. COL4 may contain space in data. COL5 may contain no value, or data with space. All fixed formatting is done with spaces (no tabs or other special characters). To clarify -- the columns are NOT consistently sized. One file might have COL4 as 13 characters, another have COL4 with 21 characters wide. Or not strict as another SO member stated.</p>