G'day Carol,

Welcome to the Monastery.

What you're describing is typically caused by embedded characters. A carriage-return ("\r") is the most usual culprit:

$ perl -e 'my $x = "abc\r"; print "|$x|"'
|abc
[download]

Without the carriage-return ("\r") the problem of losing the final character ("|") disappears:

$ perl -e 'my $x = "abc"; print "|$x|"'
|abc|
[download]

The problem usually arises when processing data from one OS (operating system) on a different OS. They have different line-endings: "\n" (Unix-style systems, including Linux & Mac OS X); "\r" (Mac versions earlier than Mac OS X); "\r\n" (MSWin).

The problem may not be a carriage-return but some other control character; for instance, something like an embedded backspace could potentially cause similar problems. Use ord to identify which, if any, embedded characters may exist:

$ perl -E 'my @x = ("A", "B\n", "C\r", "D\r\n"); for (@x) { say ord fo
+r split //; }'
65
66
10
67
13
68
13
10
[download]

Say, on a Unix-like system, you have an entire, unconverted record from an MSWin file that looks like: "abc\r\n". Using chomp (which, on a Unix-like system, will consider a newline to be the line-ending character) will only remove the terminal "\n" resulting in "abc\r" (which I used in the original example).

$ perl -E 'my @x = ("A", "B\n", "C\r", "D\r\n"); for (@x) { chomp; say
+ ord for split //; }'
65
66
67
13
68
13
[download]

In these cases, I often find it useful to remove the generic line-ending (\R) — see perlrebackslash: \R for more information.

$ perl -E 'my @x = ("A", "B\n", "C\r", "D\r\n"); for (@x) { s/\R$//; s
+ay ord for split //; }'
65
66
67
68
[download]

Do note that you'll need Perl 5.10 to use \R. If you have an older version of Perl, you can do this:

$ perl -E 'my @x = ("A", "B\n", "C\r", "D\r\n"); for (@x) { s/[\r\n]*$
+//; say ord for split //; }'
65
66
67
68
[download]

Finally, as this is your first post, I won't harp on it too much but, if you provide more information, you'll generally get a better answer that doesn't involve a lot of guesswork. See "How do I post a question effectively?" and "SSCCE".