Use Regular Expression or split function. Read man perlretut for regular expression and perldoc -f split to learn about split

open (DATAFILE3, $prog);
@lines = <DATAFILE3>;
close(DATAFILE3);

$lines[76] =~ s/^(\S+\s+\S+).*/$1/;
print "$lines[76]><br>\n"
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Also, it is not a good practice to read the entire file in a single attempt. Think, what happens if the file is huge in size?

Try something like this to avoid reading the file like the above

open (DATAFILE3, $prog);
while (<DATAFILE3>) {
     next if 1 .. 75; # flip-flop operator
     $line = $_;
     last;
}
# $line has the 76th line, do your stuff now.

close(DATAFILE3);
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Actually, you only need one control statement if you know exactly the line number you want to process, by using $. aka $INPUT_LINE_NUMBER in English.

while (<DATAFILE3>) {
     $line = $_, last
        if $. == 76;
}
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Open source softwares? Share and enjoy. Make profit from them if you can. Yet, share and enjoy!

If you don't know regular expression, simply use split function

 my @var=split / /, $lines[1];
print "$var[0] $var[1]";
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Perl Regular expressions have some cool shortcut symbols. Below we have "w" which means a word character (A-Z,a-z_0-9), W means not a word character, s is a whitespace character (\s\t\r\n\f), S is not one.

The regex means: start at beginning of line, skip any non-word characters if they are there (skips the " ), match a series of word characters followed by one or more spaces, then a field of non-space characters. w doesn't work here because of the "-", so easy was just to say non-whitespace. There are lots of variations on this theme. However you will go far with w,W,s,S and understanding what * and + mean.

Note that if the match fails, the result is undef.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $text = '"SECTIONS 1-2-3-4 Offered Every Performance!"';

#one way use regex match...

$text =~ m/^\W*(\w+\s+\S+)/; #note doesn't modify $text
                             #just checks for match
my $x = $1;
print "$x\n";

# another way without using $1
# match is in array context and we use list slice to get
# the $1 match data

$x = ($text =~ m/^\W*(\w+\s+\S+)/)[0];
print "$x\n";

__END__
prints .....
SECTIONS 1-2-3-4
SECTIONS 1-2-3-4
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