I think you might have misunderstood this paragraph from stiller's reply.

If some records miss data (...) in say the third column, your split will give you one element less for the line, rather than an array where the third element is undef, which is what you want.

Allow me to rephrase that:

If some records miss data (...) in say the third column, your split will give you one element less for the line, rather than what you want, which is an array where the third element is undef.

In other words, splitting on whitespace will cause problems if any column lacks data. That's why stiller mentions trying to get your data in another format, and wfsp suggests unpack.

In reply to Re^3: Reading a file as an multi dimensional array Please help by Not_a_Number
in thread Reading a file as an multi dimensional array Please help by sas429s

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.