in reply to Perl 'how to' question

Assuming that only line from that are part of the table contain any tab characters, then that should be easy.

open FILE, '<', $srcFile or die "Error reading $srcFile $!"; LINE: while( my $line = <FILE> ) { next LINE unless $line =~ m/\t/; my @cols = split /\t/, $line; # The @cols array numbers from zero, so for the third col, you nee +d $cols[2] print $cols[2]; } close FILE;