I'm guessing that the whitespace separating the fields on each line of input may be variable in nature -- not just a single "\t" every time (e.g. sometimes it may be tab preceded and/or followed by spaces, and sometimes it may be just spaces with no tab).

That's why I suggested the unadorned split for breaking up the input line into fields. That is equivalent to 

   split(" ",$_)

[download]
(note the quoted space, not a regex), which says "ignore leading white space in the string, and return the list of strings separated by any amount of any kind of white space."

If some of your field values are expected to contain a space now and then, and your field separation is variable (not just a single "\t" every time), then you've got a problem with unparsable data, and you need to fix that first.

(updated to fix formatting)

In reply to Re: New Problem by graff
in thread Tagging the last elements by crochunter

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