note rjt <p>Perhaps there's a bit of a language issue here, but I'm pretty sure the OP meant that the processing should work if <c>split</c> found four comma or space delimited columns, and <c>die</c> otherwise, not that <c>split</c> itself should raise an exception, even though it may have literally read that way.</p> <p>See my reply, below. I know it might not exactly hit the mark, as the specification was a little vague, but it should be easy to modify for different inputs or failure conditions.</p> 1006854 1006856