There are probably characters there you don't expect. Try using something like 'od' or 'cat -vet' to see the "invisible" characters in your file.
Jeff japhy Pinyan,
P.L., P.M., P.O.D, X.S.:
Perl,
regex,
and perlhacker How can we ever be the sold short or the cheated, we who for every service have long ago been overpaid? ~~ Meister Eckhart
Could this be a Windows to UNIX text file transfer problem? Hidden characters used in Windows text files can do strange things in UNIX. There is an EMBOSS program that will strip these for you.