Once again I'm very grateful for your kind reply and advice. Thank you for the pointers to places for me to learn: data structures *are* a big hole in my Perl knowledge and I will try to get some understanding into my fossilized head. As it happens, the requirements I'm given have been changed yet again but I'll defer questions until I can visualize what's happening with this code in your reply

/component/  && do { push @out, { $key => $value }; last };
/version/    && do { $out[-1]{$key} = $value; last };
/sourcefile/ && do { push @{$out[-1]{order}}, $value; last };
/sourcesum/  && do { $out[-1]{sources}{$out[-1]{order}[-1]} =
[download]

and hope then to need no more help ;-)

Many thanks again
Alan