http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=990513


in reply to Separate column results?!

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

(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?

I read it three times and still don't understand your post, sorry, what is the question?. You can not use split like this if you have a variable number of columns in each row. Can we see a sample of your data?

Let see:

#!/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"; }