I'm not exactly certain what you mean by this reply. The "|" character is split on and only the values in between the "|" characters are used. Maybe I'm not understanding your reply, but this script's goal is to take all the fields from an Excel file and write them to a text file, separating each field by the "|" character and each row by a newline ("\n"). UPDATE: Misunderstood mikeB's comment. Yes, things can get ugly if there's a "|" in the Excel sheet like GrandFather said. However, it's just one of many options, delimit it with what you like, or you can use Class::CSV.