I think you want something like the following inside your foreach loop. my ($name, $first_name, $tel, @rest) = split /\t/, $item; The array @rest is there as you are saying that you have a varying number of elements in each $item. Another alternative might be to just specify all possible elements and then check later if the variables are defined. Like this

my ($name, $first_name, $tel, $address, $email, $last_field) = split /
+\t/, $item;

if (defined $last_field) {
  # do something
}
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-- Hofmator