I now have to get down to the business of understanding the regular expression.

There's not much to it really. Essentially the input file consists of 5 groups of non-whitespace characters interpersed with whitespace.

The only fly in that ointment is the 4th field which itself contains whitepace, and so prevents trival parsing with split. Luckily, as only one field contains multiple words, we can let the regex engine sort it out for us. Ask it for the first 3 whitespace delimited fields, and the last one. And the fourth field is everything left over.

You might find it clearer expanded out like this:

m[
    ( \S+ ) \s+
    ( \S+ ) \s+
    ( \S+ ) \s+
    ( .+  ) \s+
    ( \S+ ) $
]x
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What if more than one field contains multiple words ?

In fact now i have multiple words in more than one field:

Nancy Drew   Elm Street      600.00      New service  Single
Stella Barry  Pine Avenue     1000.00  Replacement Single
Julie Green   Palm Street        400.00  Replacement Three
Debbie Brown  Baker Avenue      800.00   New service Three
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perl_seeker

#! perl -slw
use strict;

print "Name of consumer  Subdivision  Amount   Type of work Phase";

printf "%-14s %14s %7.2f %-14s %-s\n",
    m[(\S+\s\S+)\s+(\S+\s\S+)\s+(\S+)\s+(.+)\s+(\S+)$]
    while <DATA>;

__DATA__
Nancy Drew   Elm Street      600.00      New service  Single
Stella Barry  Pine Avenue     1000.00  Replacement Single
Julie Green   Palm Street        400.00  Replacement Three
Debbie Brown  Baker Avenue      800.00   New service Three
[download]