use Text::ParseWords; use strict; while(){ my @line=quotewords(" ",0,$_); print join"\n",@line; } __DATA__ "72 3267S" "S2079" 1 no "72 0250" "S3011" 1 no "72 8351S" "S6101" 1 no "72 17082S" "S6108" 1 no