in reply to Re^2: can't use unpack or split??
in thread can't use unpack or split??

seaver,
I'm afraid I dont understand how the '.*' will capture a space within the second column, seeing it's followed by a '\s+'?

So you ran the code, saw that it works, but didn't know why.

I would suggest perldoc perlre or perhaps The Owl Book. It works because I have anchored it at both ends ^ and $ and forced the other spaces where appropriate. Since general use of .* is frowned upon, I have modified it after reading your more constraining information here.

Cheers - L~R

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom