Ah-ha!!
Thanks, that's most likely my problem, the "null values" are actually not nulls they are spaces, sometimes 1 but it could be up 10.
Does this mean the piece of regex will not work?
Thanks again for the help I don't know how I would cope or avoid killing people without perlmonks.
Smaug

In reply to Re^2: Null scalars in array by Smaug
in thread Null scalars in array by Smaug

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