This sort of thing happens to me quite often, but my choice would be to change your split() to be more flexible (i.e. split on tabs or spaces in this case) if possible, rather than edit your data, unless of course you won't ever need to run this on unknown data in the future. I figure if there is one line of bad data, there's bound to be more sometime (especially since my data have come from manual entry or rather crusty/rusty machinery). Just a thought.