catfish1116:

At first, I guessed that formatting problem is that the data lines contain whitespace which caused that first field to blow up. I was going to suggest that you tell split to ignore whitespace like the following:

use strict;
use warnings;
my $line = <DATA>;
  while (defined($line = <DATA>)) {
    chomp($line);
    my @items = (split /\s*:\s*/, $line);
    print "Customer Name: $items[0]  \t  Number of Books checked out: 
+$items[5]\n";
  }

__DATA__
customer:field1:field2:field3:field4:num_checked_out
wilma flintstone     :1:m:n:o:3
barney rubble:1:e:i:o:5
Sam Slate   :1:3:2:1:0
Great Gazoo:1:1:2:3:2
Charlie Harper:1:a:b:c:4
Neil Gruesome:1:x:y:z:6
[download]

But when I ran the script, I got the same result you did:

$ perl ex_split_ign_whitespace.pl
Customer Name: wilma flintstone           Number of Books checked out:
+ 3
Customer Name: barney rubble      Number of Books checked out: 5
Customer Name: Sam Slate          Number of Books checked out: 0
Customer Name: Great Gazoo        Number of Books checked out: 2
Customer Name: Charlie Harper     Number of Books checked out: 4
Customer Name: Neil Gruesome      Number of Books checked out: 6
[download]

That's when I looked at your print statement: You're using a tab to try to align the columns. But a tab simply tells the print statement to go to the next column that's a multiple of 8. When your input data has width differences, you'll find that a field that's a shade too long pushes everything over eight more characters.

So the solution is to use printf with a width specifier (as tobyink mentioned), or the format statement (as hippo suggested) or pack or some such. I just tweaked it to use printf since it was the simplest change:

use strict;
use warnings;
my $line = <DATA>;
  while (defined($line = <DATA>)) {
    chomp($line);
    my @items = (split /\s*:\s*/, $line);
    printf "Customer Name: %-16s    Number of Books checked out:%3u\n"
+,
        $items[0], $items[5];
  }

__DATA__
customer:field1:field2:field3:field4:num_checked_out
wilma flintstone     :1:m:n:o:3
barney rubble:1:e:i:o:5
Sam Slate   :1:3:2:1:0
Great Gazoo:1:1:2:3:2
Charlie "the Angel" Harper:1:a:b:c:4
Neil Gruesome:1:x:y:z:1026
[download]

In this version, I added a width specifier to both the customer name *and* the number of books checked out. Notice that the columns line up correctly *unless* one of the data items is too long to fit in the field (the last two lines).

$ perl ex_split_ign_whitespace.pl
Customer Name: wilma flintstone    Number of Books checked out:  3
Customer Name: barney rubble       Number of Books checked out:  5
Customer Name: Sam Slate           Number of Books checked out:  0
Customer Name: Great Gazoo         Number of Books checked out:  2
Customer Name: Charlie "the Angel" Harper    Number of Books checked o
+ut:  4
Customer Name: Neil Gruesome       Number of Books checked out:1026
[download]

One way you can handle that is to tell split that you don't care about whitespace around your delimiter, like this:

that the data has a bunch of whitespace in it, causing yo

...roboticus

When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.

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