Hi angela2

I can see that you've already had some great responses - some more easily understood than others; so for posterity here are a couple of one-liners similar to what BrowserUk suggested here Re: problem with splitting file on whitespace: how to circumvent inconsistent formatting through file that also take into account tab delimited columns and numbers with decimal points.

one-liner to print all columns

perl -F"\s*(?=[^\d,\.])" -wanle "print qq[@F]" badfile.txt

one-liner to print column 1

perl -F"\s*(?=[^\d,\.])" -wanle "print $F[0]" badfile.txt

...use $F[n-1] to access column n, e.g. print $F[1] will print the value for column 2.

quick explanation of command-line flags

• -a and -F splits line text into the @F array; -a tells it to do the splitting and -F is used to specify the delimiter to split on - the default delimiter is space
• -w sets the warning flag similar to the use warnings pragma
• -n along with -p are the more commonly used command line switches both concerned with reading <ARGV>. -n provides us with the implicit construct

  while (<>) { "...your code here ..." }

• -l sets the output record separator $\ to the input record separator $/ - which is \n by default. I often use it to preclude the need to add \n in my print statements
• -e the most commonly used switch - it tells perl not to load and run a program file but to run the text following the -e as a program

See perlrun for a more info as I have only scratched the surface...

Best Wishes,
shadowsong

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