Correct answer:

chomp($line1=<DATA>);
my @row = split("\t",$line1) ;
print $row[0];
__DATA__
hello    world
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Explaination:

1), From perldoc: You can actually chomp anything that can be an lvalue. FileHandle cannot be an lvalue.
2), chomp returns the number of characters removed. For the other part, use substr($string,0,-1) type variation.

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