You should really read some books on Perl. We are not going to do all your work for you.

To parse the tab separated columns, you might profit from

split /\t/, $line;
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Hi Choroba, Thank you for replying, please ignore that line, I've taken the split suggestion on board and have come up with the following :) :

#!/usr/bin/perl  

use warnings;
use strict;

my $PHONE_FILE =  'phones.txt';

open(PHONE_FILE, $PHONE_FILE) or die "Can't open file: $!\n";
my @lines = <PHONE_FILE>;


foreach $_ (@lines) {
    

    my @columns = split('\t', $_);

            my $col1 = $columns[0];
            my $col2 = $columns[1];
            chomp $col1;
            print "\$columns[0]\t$columns[1]\n";
            
        }
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The data used in the text file is the following:

Apple iPhone 4            test 
Apple iPhone 4s     test1 
Apple iPhone 3G     test2
Apple iPhone 3GS     test3
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The output is:

$columns[0]     test
$columns[0]     test1 
$columns[0]     test2
$columns[0]     test3
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Please can you help me fix this? the output should be the phone name and not $columns[0]?? Thank you :)

update: I've changed it to the following:

    print "\n$columns[0]\t$columns[1]";
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works fine now :) however there is a blank space between the lines the chomp function doesn't seem to work?

#!/usr/bin/perl  

use warnings;
use strict;

my $PHONE_FILE =  'phones.txt';

open(PHONE_FILE, $PHONE_FILE) or die "Can't open file: $!\n";
my @lines = <PHONE_FILE>;


foreach $_ (@lines) {
    

    my @columns = split('\t', $_);

            my $col1 = $columns[0];
            my $col2 = $columns[1];
            chomp $col1;
            chomp $col2;
            
            print "\n$columns[0]\t$columns[1]";
            
        }
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??

And the (not shown) code runs perfectly fine

great

the colours in the __DATA__ section asign perfectly with the phone models.

can't see this section in the post. How is this data section structured?

...to adding a second column into the phones.txt file

Already with two columns... but only in some rows

iphone
samsung s2
Apple iPhone 4s     test1
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(Well in fact, with a number of columns between one and four, maybe more depending on the name of the phone, who knows?)

I added a column with values (seperated by tab) into the text file however that is also getting printed in the output file aswell as the first column? I want to differentiate between the columns at the beginning of the loop... I hope this makes sense? please can someone help me?

#!/usr/bin/perl  
use warnings; use strict;

open (my $PHONE_FILE, '<', 'phones.txt') or die "Can't open file: $!\n
+";

while(<$PHONE_FILE>) {
    chomp;
    my ($col1,$col2,@columns) = split /\t/, $_;
    print "$col1\t$col2\n";
    }
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