Then what you need to do is inspect your data. I was working on similar problem recently and finally noticed that i had a few records with trailing leading* space - that is, a space or two before any data. Use Data::Dumper to inspect your arrays (and use strict!):

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

while (my $line = <FILE>)
{
   chomp ($line);
   #$line =~ s/^\s*//;
   my @array = split(/\s+/,$line,16);   
   print Dumper \@array;
}
[download]

Also, notice that i used the third argument for split - LIMIT. Since you know that you need 16 elements, explicitly let Perl know. If you do find that trailing space is the culprit, you can uncomment the commented line from above.

Good luck!

* thanks particle ;)

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)