in reply to Newbie Trying to Read and Reformat File

That's not hard, if you're clever. I'd set up a hash for each record, initialized to default values. Something like this: 
my @records;
my @fields = qw( Company Title Phone Address Contact );
# read in a record at a time
{
    my %record;
    @record{@fields} = ('') x @fields;

    foreach my $element ($line) {
        my ($field, $value) = split(/:\s*/, $element);
        $record{$field} = $value;
    }
    push @records, \%record;
}

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Then to print, loop through @records, loop through the keys or values of each %record, and print them with a join. Make sense?

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Re: Re: Newbie Trying to Read and Reformat File
by faure (Sexton) on Aug 06, 2001 at 07:01 UTC
    Drat! Chromatic already showed you the hashslice!

    That's my favorite... anyway here is my belated version of the same thing--

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
 
my @fields = qw[Company Contact Title Phone];
 
for my $file (@ARGV) {
        open TEXT, "< $file"
                or die "Couldn't open $file: $!\n";
 
        my %contact;
 
        while(<TEXT>) {
                chomp;
                my ($k, $v) = split ": "  or next;
 
                $contact{$k} = $v;
        }
 
        # hashslice
        print join("|", @contact{ @fields }), "\n";
}

    [download]
    Just watch out for people with pipes in their names... :)
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Re: Newbie Trying to Read and Reformat File
by tbfive (Initiate) on Aug 05, 2001 at 23:26 UTC
    Looks like a great start - Thanks!
[reply]

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