I've got a bit of an issue because in my fiddling with this thing, I over-wrote the file. I can get it back and try chomp(), but my regex should be even better? Here is more of the actual code... #lines were used in my testing...
while (my $line = <IN>)
{
# print "line=$line\n";
next if $line =~/^\s*\w+:/; # The Run_Time: line
next if $line =~/^\s*$/; # A blank line
$line =~ s/\s*$//; # No trailing spaces or line ending
$line =~ s/^\s*//; # No leading space
next if $line =~ /^Call/; # Skip the CSV header line
my($call,$bracket) = (split /\|/,$line)[0,-1];
# print "$call, $bracket\n"; #### nothing printed here either
# more processing ... not shown..
}