Contrary to what everyone has been assuming, it's possible that your input file never contains three spaces in the second field -- maybe there's a single tab character in that position, and it just looks like three spaces.

So try it like this (similar to what was suggested in a later reply below): 

while (<INFILE>) {
    my @Elements = split(/;/,$_);
    
    if ($Elements[1] =~ /\S/){  # if second arg contains non-whitespac
+e
        print OUTFILE;   # ("$_" is implied here)
    }
}

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In reply to Re^3: select elements in a list by graff
in thread select elements in a list by steph_bow

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