What's the first arg to split()? It appears to be a single blank char. How does that work to split upon tab chars?

It's a space enclosed within single quotes. It tells split to split on whitespace, e.g., \t, \n, space.

In trySplitSliceLimit, wouldn't it be better to set LIMIT to 3, or in general to the number of fields you expect to extract?

It should be set to the number of fields plus one that are needed to get the fields you want. For example, using your original string:

"FIRST\tMIDDLE\tLAST\tSTRNO\tSTRNAME\tCITY\tSTATE\tZIP"
  1       2      3      4       5       6     7 ---->

my @capture = ( split /\t/, $line, 7 )[ 2, 0, 5 ];
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You want LAST FIRST CITY and CITY is the sixth field. Setting the LIMIT to seven will return the first six fields and the remainder of the string is the seventh. The slice is then used on those seven to get only the three you want.

And one observation for the record: the indices can appear in any order. To extract LAST, FIRST, and CITY, you'd write [2, 0, 5]

You're correct!

Update: Changed splitting on ' ' to \t. Thanks CountZero.

What's the first arg to split()? It appears to be a single blank char. How does that work to split upon tab chars?

It's a space enclosed within single quotes. It tells split to split on whitespace, e.g., \t, \n, space.

That is a dangerous thing to do. it works for your example data, but it will break on real word data where you will have LAST names like Van Winkle and CITYs called New York.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

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You're quite right and this has been corrected. Appreciate you catching this.

Deleted--replied to myself. Time for sleep...