Why do I get strange output from Perl using SQL?

Answer 1

Because the entire line got stocked in the $cycle_code variable. The other two variables are empty strings.

Answer 2

You should add the following line to the top of your code:

use warnings;

Or, if your already have it there, you should pay attention to the warning messages you receive. Others have correctly pointed out that your input line does not have any literal pipes. I think you really want something like this:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @tmp_field_validation = ("         1          10       2009\n");

foreach my $line  (@tmp_field_validation)
{
        chomp $line;
        $line =~ s/^\s*//;
        my ($cycle_code,$cycle_month,$cycle_year)= split /\s+/, $line;
        print "$line\n";
        print "$cycle_code|$cycle_month|$cycle_year";
}

Outputs the following:

1          10       2009
1|10|2009