This is what I came up with (this is the whole script) and i really dont know what to do to make it to work. I've been trying to mess around with stuff but it's not working.. :(

I'm looking at other wayts to write it but none of them seem as effecient (with as less lines of code) as yours. Could you quickly look through it and see if any errors/screw ups pop out at you? Your help is greatly appreciated (..and I thought Perl was going be easy as cake :)

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
    $DATA='data.txt';

    open (DATA,"<$DATA")
        || die "Can't open $DATA $!";

@line = <DATA>;

foreach (@line) {
    chop;
    ($key, $one, $two, $three, $four, $five, $six) = (split(/,/));
    $key  = "" if !defined($key); #this should make it null if nothing
+'s there
    $one = "" if !defined($one);
    $two = "" if !defined($two);
    $three  = "" if !defined($three);
    $four  = "" if !defined($four);
    $five  = "" if !defined($five);
    $six  = "" if !defined($six);
}


while (<DATA>) {
  chomp;
  @line = (split(/,/));  # was getting errors on split /,\s*/;
  $key = shift @line;
  push @{$data{$key}}, \@line;
}
print $data{"Andrea"}[0][1], " should be good\n"; # offsets off by one
+ +
print $data{"Dave"}[0][1], " should be better\n";
print $data{"Joe"}[0][1], " should be 0\n";


close(DATA);
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