Hi Fshah,
I think some clarification about PerlMonks is in order.
This is a site where you can ask questions with the intent of learning about Perl. I am completely happy to help you learn at no charge. I am happy if you are learning. I am not happy if you are not learning.

Right now it appears that you are expecting me to write your code for you - without demonstrating much effort on your part.

I do have clients that pay me for solving their problems. Quite frankly these folks will get much higher priority than you. However I and others here are willing to help you learn. BUT, that means that you need to show some coding effort.

Your points 4,5,6 and 7 tell me that you didn't run much less understand the code which I modified for you.

1) Transposing a table, converting rows to columns is not that difficult if you think logically about it. I want to see a serious attempt by you. Use the 2-d table that my code generates.

2) Setting the current field to what was before in the case that it is "blank" (whether row-wise or column-wise) is also something that you should be able to make an attempt at.

The construction of a state machine to parse your various tables was beyond either of these tasks and I felt that it was necessary to get you "unstuck".

Solving this problem will help you. Write code that generates @transposed using @array as input. I know its hard, but give it a go...

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @array = ( ['a', '1', 'L'],
              ['b', '2', 'M'],
              ['c', '3', 'N'],
              ['d', '4', 'O'],);


my @transposed = ( ['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'],
                   ['1', '2', '3', '4'],
                   ['L', 'M', 'N', 'O'],);

foreach my $row_ref (@array)
{
   print "@$row_ref\n";
}
# Prints:
#a 1 L
#b 2 M
#c 3 N
#d 4 O

foreach my $row_ref (@transposed)
{
   print "@$row_ref\n";
}
# Prints:
#a b c d
#1 2 3 4
#L M N O
[download]