in reply to Why are my numbers not numeric???

while (<INPUT>) { my $line = $_; my @file; push @file, $_; <snip>

You have declared the array @file inside the while loop which means the scope of it is limited to the body of the loop. Everytime perl will create a variable called @file and then push the line into it, only to throw it away at the end of that iteration. Coping with Scoping is an excellent reference to understand the scope of the variables.

use Regex::Common to parse common entities like Number, date etc.

-T

use perl;use strict;