Thank you for taking the time to reply. It has been several years since I had to write anything in Perl, so I have no idea how to apply the code that you provided. However, because you pointed me in the direction of the line endings, I tried a simpleton's approach to find out what they were. I turned on the "Show Invisibles" option in TextWrangler, where I had created the table as a .txt file after pasting entries from Excel. The lines all ended in the faucet-shaped character. (Sorry, I've forgotten what that's called.) Then I ran the script again, and it worked perfectly. I don't know why showing the line endings makes a difference, but I'll take it. I guess my script used to work because I would paste from the older version of Excel into TextWrangler, but when I had to switch to the new Excel for Mavericks, the line endings disappeared. Thanks again, and good night!