Thanks for the replies, but I tried

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({
     'quote_char'  => '',
     'escape_char' => '',
     'sep_char'    => "\t",
     'binary'      => 1
 });
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But still no joy... the file i'm trying to split up is here: http://www.a4uforum.co.uk/images_a4u/misc/productsYourLenses.txt

That file has null bytes in it, which seems to interfere with the Text::CSV_XS parser somehow. If you strip the null characters out of the file, it seems to work ok. (It does for me anyway.)

use warnings;
use strict;
use Text::CSV_XS;
use IO::File;

my $file = 'productsYourLenses.txt';

my $fh = new IO::File;

$fh->open("< $file") or die "Could not open $file";

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({
     'quote_char'  => '',
     'escape_char' => '',
     'sep_char'    => "\t",
     'binary'      => 1
 });
 
 my $columns;

while( 1 ){
    $columns = $csv->getline($fh);
    last unless @$columns;
    print join '|', @$columns, "\n\n";
}
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Or, for something this simple you could just use split.

use warnings;
use strict;

my $file = 'productsYourLenses.txt';

open my $fh, '<', $file or die "Could not open $file $!.\n";

my @rows;

while(<$fh>){
    chomp;
    s/\x00//g;
    my @columns = split /\t+/;
    push @rows, \@columns;
}

for (@rows){
    print join '|', @$_, "\n\n";
}
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Both of these will yield an AoA.

I was able to parse the file but since I have no idea what data to expect I don't know if it's parsing correctly. What do you mean by "no joy" - that's not very informative. Do you know how the file was produced? Are you sure it actually is a tab-separated file? What are the line endings, they show up as ^@ in emacs.