You simply want to use ($first) = $line =~ /(\S*)/;

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I believe that the original poster also wanted to capture a series of blank spaces, if that was what occupied the first element of a line.

\S matches non-whitespace characters only. . .

. . . the split solutions seem much more well-suited.

--twerq

In reply to Re: Re: Grabbing first column of text by twerq
in thread Grabbing first column of text by Anonymous Monk

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