Sorry to reply to my own post, but I think that I could state my problem a bit more clearly.
How can I capture each "element" of a line, and store it in a variable, regardless of how many elements are in the line? So, if LINE_1 contains 9 elements, I need to create 9 variables. If it contains 10, I need to create 10...and so on.
I know that if
someone reads this, they're gonna ask what I'm really trying to do:
The program will grab each element as described, ie:
conduit permit tcp|host|192.168.1.1|eq|139|host|192.168.2.1
then, it will ignore "conduit" and "permit", and insert the remaining variables into a database.