Re: How to extract these groups of characters?

[toolic]

split:

use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $str = 'joe   0.0000E 000  9.0720E-001      d23     9.0208E-001';
my @words = split /\s+/, $str;
print Dumper(\@words);

__END__

$VAR1 = [
          'joe',
          '0.0000E',
          '000',
          '9.0720E-001',
          'd23',
          '9.0208E-001'
        ];

[hippo]

I think that to reflect the OP's requirement and keep the scientific notation numbers as single fields the split regex should be /\s\s+/ instead. In all other aspects the approach looks solid.