Counting columns in file

[simplyme7]

I have a data file which has not fixed coulmns as follows:

Column11 Column12 Column13
Column21 Column22
Column31 Column32 Column33 Column34
.
.
.

I want to know what is the maximum number of columns in each raw and I want to fill all the other missing columns with "NONE" to make my file with fixed column numbers so I can use it in MATLAB.

Thanks alot

[KevinADC]

What have you tried so far?

[simplyme7]

I'm still new in perl. I only can count raws by spliting each line but so far I don't know how to deal with columns especially that I don't know how many are they in each raw. This code only give me the total raws in the file not the column.

my $COLUMN;
my $MaxColumn;
 
open (IN, 'c:\database.txt'); 
while (<IN>) { 
   chomp($line = $_);
    @COLUMN = split(/\t/,$line); # split tab 
$MaxColumn++;
}
printf "Total = $MaxColumn \n";
 

I wish that anyone can help me.
thanks

[KevinADC]

The length of the array is the number of columns:

@COLUMN = split(/\t/,$line); # split tab
print "There are ", scalar @COLUMN, " columns in this line";

Did you need each row in the file to have the same number of columns?

[simplyme7]

thank you very much. I added this line:
$ColumnSize=@COLUMN;
and it works very fine. Thanks really.

Now I need also to make every raw with the same number of columns by adding (-1) or (NONE) for the new columns without affecting the original data in each existed column.

I'm really thankful

[simplyme7]

I think I solved it by adding these lines:

open(TARGET,"> new.txt"); 
while ($size < $MaxColumn) { 
       $COLUMN[$size] = -1;
$line = join("\t",@COLUMN);
$size++;
 
  }
print TARGET $line ."\n";
 

Thank you alot for helping.