Sorry my assistance was too elementary. I spend a lot of programming time dealing with i/o issues (it's not uncommon for one of my non-Perl programs to have over 75% of the SLOC dealing with i/o), and writing format statements on the fly is one of my favorite -- and oldest -- tricks in handling i/o.
emc
At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.
—Igor Sikorsky, reported in
AOPA Pilot magazine February 2003.