Dear brethren,
I am fairly new to perl and am having difficulty parsing a logfile that does NOT have a common delimiter. A sample from the logfile looks like this:

10/1/2003 2:06:32 AM|1|Checkout Started for US-02-14@comany.com (requested by aad6870)
10/2/2003 2:07:17 AM|1|Checkout Processed for US-02-14@company.com (requested by aad6870)
10/3/2003 2:09:37 AM|1|Checkin Processed for DN-US-02-14@company.com (requested by aad6870)
10/4/2003 9:37:53 AM|1|Checkout Started for DN-US-02-14@company.com (requested by heavis6608)
10/5/2003 9:38:29 PM|1|Checkout Processed for US-02-14@company.com (requested by heavis6608)
10/6/2003 10:10:21 AM|1|Checkout Started for US-02-17@company.com (requested by vm_karthik3521)

I need to parse out the date stamp, the activity 'Checkout Started', the machine 'US-02-14@company.com', and the username 'aad6870'. What I've started on is the following: 
while (<LOGFILE1>) 
{
    
    # parse the date field with the '|' delimiter
        @dateField = split(/\|/);
    
        # parse the activity field by matching '|1|'word space word
        @activityField = split(/\|1\|\w\s\w/);

    # Start populating the fields as appropriate
    $date = $dateField[0];
    $activity = $activityField[0];
        
    ## Write the cleaned up data to the data file
    print DATAFILE "$date , ";
    print DATAFILE "$activity ,";
    print DATAFILE "\n";

}

[download]

My problem is that the parsing of the activity field returns me the entire row. Can anyone tell me what is wrong with my regular expression for the activifity field?
Am I heading in the right direction or have the I been possessed by Perl gremlins...
Any help or suggestions greatly appreciated....

In reply to Regular Expression help by Anonymous Monk

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