As the saying goes, "It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak up and remove all doubt." I'm going to go for it anyway, though. My problem is this:

I am creating a utility to parse a simple text file. I need to capture the text on certain lines into a single scalar variable, so I thought to use split thus:

($spectext) = split (0);
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where the 0 is the Limit. Fine, but when the text on one of my lines is this: 10 minutes or less, my variable for that line comes back as a "1". All the other lines come back as expected. I get that when it sees the 0 in the line, it assumes it's the delimiter instead of the default whitespace. I tried the following,($spectext) = split (" ",$_,0); which, from my handy copy of Perl by Example, looks like it should work, (specifying delimiter,string and limit) but now all I get is the first word of every line, which is not at all what I want. My code is here

 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use diagnostics;
use warnings;
my ($qnum,$qtext,$spectext,$p);
while (<DATA>){
if (^[0-9]\.|^[0-9][0-9]\.|^[0-9][A-Za-z]\.|^[0-9][0-9][A-Za-z]\.){
     $p = 1;
    ($qnum,$qtext) = split (/\./);
    print "L Q$qnum\nttlQ$qnum. $qtext\nn10base - total respondents\n"
+;
    }
elsif (^[A-Z]|^[0-9]){
    ($spectext) = split (0);
     chomp $spectext;
     print "n01$spectext;c=c{Q$qnum}'$p'\n";
     $p++;
     }
else {
     print;
     }
}
----DATA----
1. Question text?

2 minutes or less
3 to 4 minutes
5 to 9 minutes
10 minutes or more

2. Question text?

Excellent
Very good
Good
Fair 
Poor

----Desired output------
L Q1
ttlQ1. Question text?
n10Base - Total Respondents
n012 minutes or less;c=c{Q1}'1'
n013-4 minutes;c=c{Q1}'2'
etc....
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Pax,

NovMonk