Another simple yet effective way to eliminate the 'extra' whitespace would be to hit the line with something like this.

@line=~s/ +/ /g;

[download]

This should simply eliminate all duplicate whitespace chars and replace them with a single whitespace char so that you then can use a naive split().

In reply to Re: parsing sloppy text from columns by draconis
in thread parsing sloppy text from columns by halley

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