Post your code and a couple of lines of data. The examples given _do_ work. Perhaps we are missing a part of the problem?

#!/usr/bin/perl

while ( <DATA>) {
  ($a,$b) = split ' ';
  print "split '$a','$b'\n";
  my ($a,$b) = $_ =~ /(\S+)\s+(\S+)/;
  print "match '$a','$b'\n";
}

__DATA__
         none          bing 
         some          bong 
         any          bang
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output:

split 'none','bing'
match 'none','bing'
split 'some','bong'
match 'some','bong'
split 'any','bang'
match 'any','bang'
[download]