Specific fixed width question...

[fork]

Two lines of example data (notice that the county field (#4) is 25 characters
wide and that spaces are used both between fields like WA and 053 and between
parts of the county name, so you can't just split on spaces):

WA 053 011 Clark County             45
WA 053 027 Grays Harbor County      100

I would like to parse out cntys=[11; 27] and data=[45; 100] from the above.

I realize that I can pre-process the file outside of Octave, but I don't want to
for various reasons (lack of access to real Unix tools, mostly).