in reply to Extracting data from a flat file and inserting it into a databas

Here is a start for you:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $file = 'scribefaith'; open(FILE,"<$file") or die "Cannot open $file"; while (<FILE>) { print $1 if (m/^Request Number:\s+([0-9]+)/); # insert various regular expressions here to match tags } close(FILE);
this extracts the Request number. I get the feeling the file should have more tabs than spaces, so I would suggest m/^Affected User:\s+(.*)\t+/ as the next regex, I'm sure more talented monks will come up with a better set of regex however... I'll leave you to work out the rest :)

I know there's a cpan module to do CSV files, but this isnt a CSV (or at least not in my world...) perhaps it could be adapted to deal with this file format.

Update: fix typo