title: How can I break apart fixed-width columns in Perl?
body: <p>Programming is so new to me that I apologize for not knowing how to phrase the question.</p>
  
  <p>I have a Perl script that gets a variable from an internal tool. This isn't always what it looks like, but it will always follow this pattern:</p>
  
  <pre><code>darren.local           1987    A      Sentence1
  darren.local           1996    C      Sentence2
  darren.local           1991    E      Sentence3
  darren.local           1954    G      Sentence4
  darren.local           1998    H      Sentence5
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>With Perl, what's the easiest way to get each of these lines into a variable by itself? Depending on what the internal tool spits out each line will always be different and there can be more than five lines. The capitalized letter in each line is what it will end up being sorted by (all As, all Cs, all Es, etc.). Should I be looking at regular expressions? </p>