G'day Hena,

If you don't want split to remove trailing empty fields, then you can supply it with a third argument, set to a negative value. Normally this is the maximum number of fields you wish split to generate, but Perl will interpret a negative number to mean leaving all fields intact, including empty ones.

In your particular example, you would change your split line to:

my @a = split(/\t/,$a,-1);
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For more information on this feature, check out perldoc -f split or the online documentation on this function.

All the very best,