Hello, I am just getting started with Perl and I have not used any programming languages in the past. I hope you can help me with this.

I am not able to effectively use hashes to parse, sort or replace data from a text file. I have read through a couple of books (Learning Perl, Perl by Example) and browsed Perl websites, but I am still having difficulty grasping the concepts. For example, I am trying to take a text file and sort the results in any way I choose. I can't seem to find a real-world example where I read a file into a hash and parse/sort and/or replace data. Here is my code for parsing data using arrays which works: 
 #!/usr/bin/perl
 use strict; 
 use warnings; 
 open (FILE, '<', 'FB_LPWAP.txt') or die ("ERROR: Could not read file"
+);
 print <FILE>; #Prints entire file 
 while (<FILE>){ 
 my @array = split /\t/, $_; 
 print "$array[0]\t"; #Date 
 print "$array[1]\t"; #Closing Price 
 print "$array[2]\n"; #Weighted Average Price 
 } 
 close (FILE);

[download]


I still have a lot to learn, but I am hoping someone could help point me in the right direction as I have not be able to use hashes on a text file that has multiple columns of data without receiving a number of syntax/compilation errors. The text file I have has multiple columns and I would like to parse certain columns using hashes. I also have would like to sort the data. I don't know how to reference my columns. Here is the sample data in my test file: 

TICKER|       CO. NAME|   PRICE|    MARKET CAP|    INDUSTRY
ABC      |      ABC Co.|    15.5|    5000|            Industrials
AB       |      Alpha Beta| 12|    2500|            Materials
DOZ      |      ZZZZZ|         5.05|    2800|            Telecom
DX      |      DX Co.|     77.2|    12000|            Industrials
DXX      |      DXX Co.|    50.25|    9000|           Utilities

[download]


Thank you.

In reply to Reading Text File into Hash to Parse and Sort by Perl_Derek

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