[ale] Perl Help split stopped working recently

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

I have this complete, simple, perl program ...

==
#!/usr/bin/env perl
   
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;

my $start_time = "";
my $stop_time = "";

while (<>){
  chomp;
  my $line = $_;

   ( $start_time, $stop_time ) = split( / - /, $line, 2);

    print "Line: $line\n \t $start_time, $stop_time\n";
}
==

And I feed it this input file:

==
   5:00 AM - 6:00 AM Live
   6:00 AM - 7:00 AM New
==

This pattern for split is something I've used for over 25 yrs and 2 weeks ago, it was working as expected.  Today, it doesn't work.  The $stop_time isn't being set.  split() ain't workin'.  The $start_time ends up with a copy of the line.

Tried with perl v5.30 and v5.33 on 2 different systems. Same results.

I expect the start to be "  5:00 AM" and the stop to be "6:00 AM Live" for the first input after the split().

Any ideas?  I'm assuming it is something dumb, but for something this simple, I'm just missing it.