c:\@Work\Perl\monks\Anonymous Monk\1158543>perl -e "use strict; use warnings; use Data::Dump 'pp'; ;; my $file_name = 'file.csv'; open my $lines, '<', $file_name or die qq{opening file '$file_name': $!}; ;; while (my $line = <$lines>) { pp $line; next unless $line =~ /\S/; chomp $line; my $data; ($data->{date}, $data->{day}, $data->{name}) = split(/,/, $line); pp $data; print qq{------- \n} } " "01/04/2014,Friday,Joe\n" { date => "01/04/2014", day => "Friday", name => "Joe" } ------- "02/11/2011,Monday,Mary\n" { date => "02/11/2011", day => "Monday", name => "Mary" } ------- "05/09/2016,Monday,Ann\n" { date => "05/09/2016", day => "Monday", name => "Ann" } ------- "07/02/2013,MOnday,Marc\n" { date => "07/02/2013", day => "MOnday", name => "Marc" } ------- "\n"