Whilst chuckling at DrHydes sledgehammer reference (I think he has a good point there!) I think you have been well advised. One of my clients handles vast amounts of data that comes in a variety of formats. Some of it even as Excel spreadsheets! A small fistful of Perl tools including a 'universal data format convertor' I wrote recently to handle pretty much any text file layout allows him to easily get the files and put them into a database.

For routine jobs that are done every day we handle the files from an email server, the incoming files are always sent to an appropriate user name and a Perl programme collects the email, reads the attachment, processes the data and adds it to a database to be checked before it is made available to the larger pool of users.

This is indeed the stuff at which Perl excells!

jdtoronto