Contrary to Laurent_R's aversion to using a single regex to extract data fields from a record expressed herein, I find it's often both more robust and more maintainable.

The trick is to combine record validation and record field extraction in one operation. Of course, in the words of the famous witticism, now you have two problems: coming up with a regex to match an entire data record may not be easy (and robustly matching, e.g., a name, even if the nationality domain is well defined, can be quite tricky, so you often end up with a hack like  \S+ as a 'temporary' expedient), but once defined, the regex, properly factored, can be quite clear and fairly easy to maintain.

The example below takes liberties with names, those tricky devils, and otherwise assumes much about the OPed dataset, but shows the basic idea. 

c:\@Work\Perl>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $record = do {
   my $id    = qr{ \d+ }xms;
   my $name  = qr{ [[:upper:]] [[:lower:]]+ }xms;
   my $first = $name;
   my $last  = $name;
   my $age   = qr{ \d+ }xms;
   qr{
     \A  ID=    ($id)
     \s+ First= ($first) \s+ Last= ($last)
     \s+ AGE=   ($age)
     \z
     }xms;
   };
 ;;
 for my $rec ('ID=1 First=John Last=Doe AGE=42', @ARGV) {
   my ($id, $first_name, $last_name, $age) = $rec =~ m{ $record }xms
     or die qq{malformed record: '$rec'};
   print qq{id '$id'  first '$first_name'  last '$last_name'  age '$ag
+e'};
   }
"  "ID=2  First=Joe  Last=42  AGE=Doe"
id '1'  first 'John'  last 'Doe'  age '42'
malformed record: 'ID=2  First=Joe  Last=42  AGE=Doe' at -e line 1.

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In reply to Re^3: Having an Issue updating hash of hashes by AnomalousMonk
in thread Having an Issue updating hash of hashes by perlguyjoe

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