Thanks very much for the feedback, everyone and sorry about any confusion, I hope my questions aren't trivial. I've 4 further questions on Revised Code Below, thanks very much in advance.

1. If I use $in on Lines 6 - 8 and print any elements, the entire lines of the file are returned without being processed (with pipes included). I thought I could substitute $_ with any variable. Why won't it work here?

2. If I use $_ on these lines instead, then I get good results (the specified element on Line 12.

3. If I UnComment Lines 9 - 11, a '1' is returned between the last 2 elements in each line. Why is that?

4. To clarify myself (on moritz's question), even-numbered elements return nothing, eg. if I type print $fields[0], "\r"; on line 12 in my revised script, I get nothing. I've found that any even number gives me nothing, it's odd, I thought the 0th element would be 'Baw', the 1st element would be 'Vao' and so on. The pipe is discarded by perl, so I don't understand why the even-numbered elements are 'skipped', so to print 'Baw', I type print $fields1, "\r" and to print 'Vao', I type print $fields3, "\r"

1 #!/usr/bin/perl -w
2 use strict;
3 
4 open my $datfh, '<', 'C:\begperl\my scripts\cdata.txt' or die "Could
+n't open file: $!\n";
5 
6 foreach my $_ (<$datfh>) {
7     my @fields = (map { s/^\s+//; s/\s+$//, $_ }    # eliminates irr
+elevant spaces
8     split /\|/, $_);
9 #        for my $i (0 .. $#fields) {
10 #        print $fields[$i], "\n" unless $fields[$i] =~ /\r|\n/;
11 #        }
12     print $fields[1], "\r";
13 }
14 close $datfh;
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