Converting space-aligned text

["Victoria Wroblewski" <victoria -dot- wroblewski -at- eagletest -dot- com>]

All,

We've got a monster of a plain text file that is generated from our
equipment that we need to format into something more professional
looking.  Basically, it spits out data that we want to format to look
something like the following:

   6.20      x.xxxx  xxxx       xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   6.21                           x = x.x
   6.22      x.xxxx  xxxx       xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
   6.23                           x = x.x
   6.24     xx.xxxx  xxxx       xxxxxxxxxxxx
   6.25                           x = x.x

The problem is that it spits this out as a text file with everything
spaced using spaces, and not tabs.  Makin' it pretty means going in and
manually converting various lengths of spaces into tabs, or aligning it
all with spaces (and it's been a "six of one, half a dozen of the other"
experience using either method).

Are there any tools out there that can deal with helping to convert this
kind of stuff?  I haven't been able to find a way to automate the
removal of the spaces, since they can be different on each line, but I
don't know if this type of edit is common enough where someone has put
together any sort of application that will even do something like
convert areas with more than two spaces into a tab rather than spaces.

Anyone??


Thanks,


Victoria Wroblewski
Developer - Technical Documentation
Eagle Test Systems, Inc.


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