All good points ++

I read a paper once that explained very clearly why the two character line endings (CR, LF) in DOS was a mistake, I have no idea where it was but Wikipedia echoes the sentiment. Either way documenting it is OK but using the line endings appropriate for your OS is a better approach.

Two points I would add

• Allow comments -my preference is for # comments
• Ignore blank and whitespace only lines

Hence any data file parsing I do usually ends up beginning like this-

 next if /^\s*#/;
 next if /^\s*$/;
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