If you are *sure* that the entries are separated by spaces and not by tabs AND THAT no entry will contain spaces, you can use the highly effective:

my @fields = split /\s+/, $data_line;
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To split on "one or more bits of whitespace" (tabs, carriage returns, newlines, etc.). If you want to match spaces specifically, change the \s to a space.

perlman:perlre for all the goodness of Perl regexen.

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor