That looks a lot more perlish!. I changed it slightly to use the same data in an external file & I get an error for each line of the file that has a "/". (Of course, to get those errors I uncommented the 'no warnings' line)

Last   First   Phone   Bldg    Room    email
 
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 2.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 2.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 2.
                           ----
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 5.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 5.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 5.
                          john
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 8.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 8.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 8.
                          ed@a.nl
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 11.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 11.
Use of uninitialized value in printf at PL.pl line 11, <FH> line 11.
                         cbest
[download]

If I redirect the output to a file, it looks like this:

Last   First   Phone   Bldg    Room    email
 
Alanon  Bart^M                           ----
O'Lewis John.^M                          john
Le Much Bo Jo^M                          ed@a.nl
Abe-Jen Mar-Jo^M                         cbest
[download]

The file, as I ran it is:

#!/opt/bin/perl -slw
use strict;
 
print "\nLast   First   Phone   Bldg    Room    email\n";
 
open FH => "<testdata.txt" or die "can't find the data file: $!\n";
 
until( eof( FH ) ) {
#       no warnings 'uninitialized';
        printf '%-7.7s %-7.7s ',     <FH> =~ m[ ([^,]+) , \s* (.+) $]x
+;
        printf '%7.7s %7.7s %7.7s ', <FH> =~ m[ ([^/]+) / (?:(\S+)\s+)
+? (\S+) $]x; 
        printf "%s\n",               <FH> =~ m[^(\S+)];
}
[download]

I definitely don't understand what's happening in the second half of the middle regexp.

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