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
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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]

#!/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+)];
}
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Weird! The ^Ms that are getting left behind on the end of the first names suggests that the contents of the data file is weird, though given the source that's no real surprise.

The reason for having the no warnings 'uninitialized' is to avoid the need for a special case to deal with location lines that don't contain the room number. The regex is saying:

m[
    ([^/]+) / # capture the phone number before the slash
    (?: #optionally capture the room number if it is exists
        (\S+) # capture all the non-spaces between the / 
        \s+   #and one or more spaces
    )? # but only if there are two sets of non-spaces 
       # separated by a one or more spaces before EOL
    (\S+) #capture the building code.
    $
]x;
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If the room number isn't present, the second capture ($2) will be undefined, hence the need to suppress the warning. However, that you are getting three warnings means that all 3 captures are undefined (ie. the regex failed to match), which suggests that the data in the file is formatted somewhat differently to the sample data you posted.

Without being able to see the actual contents of the file it is a little difficult to diagnose the problem.

Perhaps you could run this one liner on the data file to dump the first few lines in hex and post the output here?

perl -nle" exit if $. == 15; print unpack 'H*', $_" testdata.txt
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---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

"Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
"Think for yourself!" - Abigail

OK, BrowserUk, here are the results.

%perl -nle" exit if $. == 15; print unpack 'H*', $_" testdata.txt
Illegal variable name.
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Hope you can make sense of it ...

-Theo-
(so many nodes and so little time ... )