You've missed part of the regexp out (the bit that captures comments) and missed a backslash out (from \d{5}). It looks like you don't know that, in a regexp, parentheses capture their matches into $1, $2, $3 etc. Again, see perlretut and perlre for the details.

Your code is similar to mine. You use 

while ( ... ) {
    unless ( some-condition ) {
        next
    }
    some-code
}

[download]

while I prefer the equivalent 

while ( ... ) {
    if ( some-condition ) {
        some-code
    }
}

[download]

it's just that (IMHO) yours is harder to read (and longer, too)

That said, you can use my code with a filehandle like so (I've rearranged it a bit to use unless and made the regexp a more lenient towards spaces)... 

while ( <DATAFILE> ) {
    chomp;
    unless ( m{^ (\d\.\d{5}) \s*,\s* (\d\d:\d\d:\d\d) \s* (.*) $ }x ) 
+{
        next
    }

    my ( $quote, $time, $comment ) = ( $1, $2, $3 ); # captures
    my ( $hours, $minutes, $seconds ) = split /:/, $time;

    #do something with $quote, $hours, $minutes, $seconds & $comment
}

[download]

In reply to Re^3: handling erronous input by FunkyMonk
in thread handling erronous input by Conal

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