my @fields = split /\t/, $_;
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You forgot to remove the trailing newline. (Note the \n in the OP's regex.)

chomp;
my @fields = split /\t/, $_;
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And if you want to keep empty trailing fields, you'll need to specify the third parameter.

chomp;
my @fields = split /\t/, $_, -1;
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When you are matching against something in $_, you don't have to say $_ =~ /.../ but can just use /.../ as the match will be against $_ by default.

You don't have to put square brackets around the \d as it is already a character class denoting digits.

Cheers,

JohnGG

I've written this but it is not processing the lines correctly.

win, there has been a reply to your post: how to split this on tabs, but if its required to do with regexes, your project condenses to sth. like this:

 ...
 open my $filehandle, '<', 'win.ini' or die "with style $!";
 
 while( <$filehandle> ) {
    if( (my @fields = /^\d+ | [^\t]+/xg) == 8 ) {
       print "all 8 elements found: @fields\n"
    }
 }
 ...
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Regards

mwa

correction: [^\t] replaced [^\s], this is what I used in a small test run (and forgot to modify after this.)

You might wanna change the '\t's in your parenthesis to '\d's instead. Right now your regex is looking for a number followed by a mess of tabs....followed by newline.

...roboticus

Update: Need new glasses...

Do you really want to be using Text::CSV or Text::xSV?