How can I use Perl extract a particular column from a tab-separated file?

Question

I am really new at Perl and have been trying to piece together a solution for this. When I run this program I don\'t get any errors and it doesn\'t display anything.

Answer 1

Try this instead:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

open (DATA, ";
my @header_titles = split /\t/, $header;
my $extract_col = 0;

for my $header_line (@header_titles) {
  last if $header_line =~ m/$search_string/;
  $extract_col++;
}

print "Extracting column $extract_col\n";

while ( my $row =  ) {
  last unless $row =~ /\S/;
  chomp $row;
  my @cells = split /\t/, $row;
  print "$cells[$extract_col] ";
}