Programming

Hmmm. I'm a bit

1. It does not matter how many columns you see on your window/terminal, because Perl will read from file.
2. Your example looks like a clean and complete line, therefore there should not be any problems processing it.
3. Power Outage is in the 9th column, but you initially wanted to cut the 8th
4. To be honest I did not understand following: a regexp to only print that which has spaces between and print everything on each side until they reach a "|"

If there is only one column value that is extracted, I would suggest to extract it directly from split instead of pushing it to an array and fetching it from that.

Code:

my $output = (split(/\|/,$line)[7]);

this means that a line doesn't conform to what you are looking for.
maybe a blank line?

a few ideas:

you could check the split had eight fields as expected.

Code:

warn "this line '$line' failed to split" unless @hash_array == 8;

skip blank lines like:

Code:

next unless /./;

it's good to get to know your data intimately.