ok, i guess my comments aren't all proper. :-(

the original one was whitespaces ...

the strings, at least on STDOUT, are identical. i just tossed in this in the 'real' parser:

my $string2 = '5422  Texas Home Luggage Tag                 6 @ $    3
+.95 = $      23.70';
print "identical strings \n" if $_ eq $string2;
[download]

and it did, in fact, print "identical strings".