[Israel.pm] parsing columns

[Offer Kaye]

On 8/13/05, Gábor Szabó wrote:
> As a person looking at this file, how do you know that in row 2
> you have column 1 and 4 filled

Alignment with header. As a human it's easy for me to see they are
aligned. As a program, guess I'll have to count whitespace or
something.

> while in row 3 you have
> column a and 2 ?

Exactly my problem :(
I do have some knowledge of the type of data in each column, but I was
hoping to avoid using that, as that will lead to code with
many-many-many special cases. Off-hand, I couldn't see a way to tell
if in row3, dat2 belongs to col2 or col3, without knowing something
about the data. But I was hoping maybe someone on the list knew of
some magic I was not aware of ...

Regards,
-- 
Offer Kaye