in reply to Invisible characters
I suspect that toolic has the right idea. Your basic code is fine; I've tried it on my system and it works for me:
gives for output#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Data::Dumper; # open a filehandle # file being read from while(<DATA>){ my @fields = split /,/; my $field1 = $fields[0]; my $field2 = $fields[1]; print "$field1\t$field2\n"; } __DATA__ "-0.500, 4.502e-6" "-0.499, 4.474e-6" "-0.498, 4.458e-6" "-0.497, 4.445e-6" "-0.496, 4.433e-6" "-0.495, 4.421e-6"
So the best bet is that you do, as your title says, have some invisible characters hiding in there. So follow toolic's advice and you'll smoke them out."-0.500 4.502e-6" "-0.499 4.474e-6" "-0.498 4.458e-6" "-0.497 4.445e-6" "-0.496 4.433e-6" "-0.495 4.421e-6"
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