ehm ...

> > spaces before and after

the spaces before are IMHO best dealt by stripping them before splitting. °

$line =~ s/^\s+//;

Even your pseudo python code can't do this in a one-liner with split (IMHO).

But more importantly your definition of "field" is fuzzy now.

Please clarify

update

provided there are no "empty fields" and "multiple whitespaces" are allowed as separators:

You can use a regex like /(\S+)/g ( \S is non-whitespace, the opposite of \s)

Debugger demo:

  DB<35> $line = " a0 a1 a2 a3 a4 a5 a6 a7 a8 a9 \n"

  DB<36> x ($line =~  /(\S+)/g)[0,1,3,5,7,9]
0  'a0'
1  'a1'
2  'a3'
3  'a5'
4  'a7'
5  'a9'

  DB<37>

[download]

Cheers Rolf
(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery

update

°) or by using the magic of ' ' soonix showed us here.

In reply to Re: Extracting selected fields form file record (updated) by LanX
in thread Extracting selected fields form file record by Anonymous Monk

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