Are you only printing this to a screen or to a file? Is it possible these files contain \r or \b characters? What if you added s/\s/ /g; after you chomp?

How should I handle RTF without using a module?

The only reliable way to do so is to read the (competing) specifications, experiment a lot, build up a comprehensive test suite, and consider some form of prayer and fasting. If the whitespace experiment doesn't fix things, you're probably much better off using a module.

Improve your skills with Modern Perl: the free book.

In reply to Re: Parsing an RTF File as plain text. by chromatic
in thread Parsing an RTF File as plain text. by Ekimino

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