Huh? Tab, the character which was included in ASCII specifically for aligning tabular data is a "horrific" way of representing tabular data?

Personally I find tab-delimited files to be very easy to deal with. With CSV data, the fields will often contain commas (addresses fields; some date formats and numeric formats) necessitating ways of "escaping" commas which vary between software packages. It is quite common to be in situations where you know that the fields themselves cannot contain \t or \n; and in those cases tab delimited data is a joy to work with. Want to slurp your data into a multi-dimensional array?

my @data = map { chomp; split /\t/ } <$fh>;

[download]

I'd suggest that if your text editor makes distinguishing between tabs and spaces difficult, then you should investigate other text editors.

(Aside: yes, there are some very good CSV parsers for Perl which abstract away the nits when dealing with CSV. When you have to work with CSV in other programming languages you appreciate what a good job they do.)

perl -E'sub Monkey::do{say$_,for@_,do{($monkey=[caller(0)]->[3])=~s{::}{ }and$monkey}}"Monkey say"->Monkey::do'

In reply to Re^2: EMPTY OUTPUT FILE GENERATED by tobyink
in thread EMPTY OUTPUT FILE GENERATED by perlneedhelp2012

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