I totally agree with cLive ;-). Suck it and see often works well. However why not allow some flexibility:

$,="~";
$data = join'', <DATA>;
@bits = split /\W+/, $data;
print @bits;

__DATA__
aa
bb
cc
dd,ee,ff,

gg    hh    ii

jj kk ll
mm  nn  oo
pp|qq|rr
^&$just#$@another#%%^perl@!^hacker!#
[download]

This will split your data on *any* non alphanumeric separators - newlines, spaces, commas, whatever.

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

Can I have only one textarea (2columns 52rows) to accept all the states that she wishes to input and then parse that data?

OK, I wanted to just say "yes," because this really smells of homework (the restriction on the UI, for instance). But given that you *did* pose a specific question ...

CGI.pm isn't really the controlling factor. It depends on how the *user* enters it -- do they put line breaks or other spacers in themselves, or do they type it all in without spacers of any sort? So my advice is, in the HTML that presents the form with the text input field (be it an input field or a textarea), you tell the users what you want, and have your program proceed according to that. Visually easiest on you and on your users, I would think, is a comma or a space. Then, you just use split on the resulting string that you get using CGI.pm's param function. split is wicked-easy to use:

my $string="these are the times that try men's souls";
my @words = split /\s/, $string;
# @words now holds "these", "are", "the" ... etc.
[download]

HTH

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
[download]

Since the state abbreviations are only two characters long, you can write a regex that should handle it with no problems.

$states = "NY\nNJWA\nALCOOR";
print "-$1-\n" while($states =~ /(\w\w)/g);
[download]

It seems an odd way to do it, though. Why would the user want to type in each state that way? Seems much, much easier to go with someone else's suggestion here and use a SELECT box instead.

(And headlights would work at the speed of light, since they're traveling relative to your speed.)

"And headlights would work at the speed of light.."

Hmm, methinks you need to read up on physics a little bit.

Or think about this. If you could^* travel at the speed of light and you turned them on, are you saying the light would shine forwards and then reflect back to you? If so, then light is travelling faster than the speed of light. Oh but hang on, it can't, coz it travels at the speed of light. Therefore, you travel through where you want them to shine at the same speed that the light shines at, so the lights won't illuminate things in front of you, therefore they don't "work".

cLive ;-)

^*...let's forget about the time travel and infinite mass problems etc here for simplicity's sake!

Why ask this question, when in the time it takes you to draw the pretty table, you could have tried this out for yourself and found out!

cLive ;-)

PS - I'd make it 3 chars across anyway, so she can use space instead of CR and then just split on "\s+" (whitespace).

What is the impetus for this requirement? It seems like using a good HTML  <select multiple> would be a better way to go.