Hi,

I have a problem -- I have a text file like this:

This is a line.
Another line is here.
  Here's a line.

Line five is this one.

What I need to do is get the first column of each of these (columns being ended by spaces), so that my output looks like this:

This
Another


Line

As you can see, if the line begins with spaces or is empty, I just want to print out a blank line so I can tell that there was something there. I would do this on my own, but this is just a little part of a much bigger project of mine, and I'm still just learning Perl and I'm really bad with regular expressions. Any help would be much appreciated (and I promise to learn from your answers before I return!). Thanks!

In reply to Grabbing first column of text by Anonymous Monk

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