I would use split. You can use the special split on whitespace to turn your columns into elements of a list like so
my @cols = split ' ', $type;
and then go from there. For your second question, it depends. Are you sure it's strict that's complaining and not the taint checker? What does the code look like for "ENV={PATH}" that you mentioned?

In reply to Re: Regex matching and setting variables by Errto
in thread Regex matching and setting variables by linebacker

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