Hi Ovid,

You wrote:

As it turns out, each line of the file represents one type
of quote and the format and the format, while consistent for 
each quote type, varies from type to type. In other words,
one line may have five fields and the next line may have
eight.
[download]

It seems to me that by the time you've done something like

while(<DATA>)
{
  chomp;
  my @line = split(',',$_);
}
[download]

then you can be fairly certain of a few things:
@line[0] is the request type
@line[@line-2] is the date
@line[@line-1] is the timestamp
(And after you verify those with your regexes then
you'll know it for sure).

It seems to me that anything from @line[1..(@line-3)]
is the data you are interested in. This is one way to deal
with variable-length fields in your data:

#!/usr/bin/perl

while(<DATA>)
{
  chomp;
  /^$/ and next;
  my @line = split(/,/,$_);

  for(@line[1..(@line-3)])
  {
    /\d+\.[\d]{4}/ or next;
    printf("%s\t%s\n",$line[0],$_);
  }

}

exit;
[download]

I haven't done any of the nifty stuff you are doing-
building references etc.- because I still have a hard time
grokking them...

Tentatively,
blyman