What you need is a regular expression. See perlman:perlre for details. Regular expressions are tuned to do specific things. As such if you want useful help we need real data. If you have some code that fails to work that is also good. You need to specify exactly what you are trying to achieve. Ideally you would post something like

• A: this is my exact input data
• B: this is exactly what I want to get out of it
• C: this is my broken code.
• D: my code messes up on.....

When you post this please use the <code> </code> tags to wrap the data and code in to retain the formatting. These tags are like supercharged pre tags where the HTML special chars are automatically escaped.

Update

Looking at your raw data you can do this in one line:

/^(\S+)/ && print "$1\n" while <DATA>;

__DATA__
EXAMPLE1    NS    ns0.test.com
            NS    ns1.test.com
EXAMPLE2    NS    ns0.test.com
            NS    ns1.test.com
EXAMPLE3    NS    ns0.test.com
            NS    ns1.test.com
EXAMPLE4    NS    ns0.test.com
            NS    ns1.test.com

# this prints
EXAMPLE1
EXAMPLE2
EXAMPLE3
EXAMPLE4
[download]

You may find this easier to understand:

while (my $line = <DATA>) {
    if ( $line =~ /^(\S+)/ ) {
        print "$1\n";
    } 
}
[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print