And the (not shown) code runs perfectly fine

great

the colours in the __DATA__ section asign perfectly with the phone models.

can't see this section in the post. How is this data section structured?

...to adding a second column into the phones.txt file

Already with two columns... but only in some rows

iphone
samsung s2
Apple iPhone 4s     test1
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(Well in fact, with a number of columns between one and four, maybe more depending on the name of the phone, who knows?)

I added a column with values (seperated by tab) into the text file however that is also getting printed in the output file aswell as the first column? I want to differentiate between the columns at the beginning of the loop... I hope this makes sense? please can someone help me?

#!/usr/bin/perl  
use warnings; use strict;

open (my $PHONE_FILE, '<', 'phones.txt') or die "Can't open file: $!\n
+";

while(<$PHONE_FILE>) {
    chomp;
    my ($col1,$col2,@columns) = split /\t/, $_;
    print "$col1\t$col2\n";
    }
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