First of all, I'm not even sure split() is the best way to do this. I just started learning Perl two weeks ago, so I apologize if I seem silly. I have data that look like this: 
1xny_01  PROPIONYL-COA CARBOXYLASE COMPLEX B -0.8192  A A A
1xqd_00  CYTOCHROME P450 55A1                -46.5601 A B A

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What I need to do is read each line, compare the last three characters (e.g. A A A) and output the line if they are the same. I figured I'd store each of these as separate entities so I used split () in this way: 
while ($line = <FILE>) {
chomp;
($a, $b, $c, $d, $e, $f, $g, $h) = split (/\s+/,$line);

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and I figured I could do something like if $f=$g=$h, then output the line that returns that as true. but the problem is PROPIONYL-COA CARBOXYLASE COMPLEX B is stored as 4 characters while CYTOCHROME P450 55A1 is stored as 2 charaters. How can I set them to be read as a single string? or if split is not the best way, can you suggest any other way to do this?

EDIT: Thank you for the replies, everyone! What I did was simply this:

while ($line = <FILE_NEW>) {
chomp;

($a, $b, $c) = (split /\s+/,$line) [ -1,-2,-3 ] ;
}

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In reply to ignore some delimiters while using split by nurulnad

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