Unless you post a complete example of the line to be parsed, we cannot help you. Since I am a nice guy, though, I will explain why you need more than split for this problem.

The better solution would be to use the m// operator and the grouping variables: $1, $2, etc. I'll explain by parsing an entry from an Apache web server access log

$line = '127.0.0.1 - - [26/Mar/2001:16:01:07 -0500] "GET /stuff/ HTTP/
+1.0" 200 11874'
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Each entry is seperated by dashes, brackets, or quotes - but since we know the general layout, we can write a regualar expression that is general enough to parse each line, but specific enough to get the data we want - just the IP of the referrer, the date stamp and the requested document ( along with request type)

use strict;
my ($ip,$date,$method,$file,$header,$status,$pid) = $line =~ 
    /^([\d.]+)      # $id     = ip quad
    \s*-\s*-\s*     # skip over these
    \[(.*?)\]\s"    # $date   = everything between the brackets
    (\w+)\s*        # $method = the method, usually GET or POST
    ([^\s]+)\s*     # $file   = everything UP TO the next white space
    (.*)"\s*        # $header = everything UP TO the next double quote
    (\d+)\s*        # $status = digits between spaces
    (\d+)\s*$/x;    # $pid    = last set of digits

print "$ip\n$date\n$method\n$file\n$status\n$pid\n";
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By no means I am an master of regular expressions, the ones I chose just happen to work - there are better ways then using .* - but a little badness won't kill ya' :)

Big Thanks to Albannach.

Jeff

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