First up, you should really use a module for handling your tab separated data. Next, think in terms of read a record and print it. Then you get something like:

#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Text::CSV; my $csv = Text::CSV->new({binary => 1, sep_char => "\t"}); my @headers = @{$csv->getline(*DATA)}; while (my @data = @{$csv->getline(*DATA) // []}) { print "$_\t", shift @data, "\n" for @headers; print "\n"; } __DATA__ Animal keepers M/F YEAR DOB AGE FSM PREM ET ND + AL EAL GIRAFFE JAMES LE M 9 10/12/2007 Y Y N N HIPPOS JACKIE LEAN F 6 11/12/2007 Y N Y Y ZEBRAS JAMES LEHERN M 3 12/12/2007 N N N Y LIONS AMIE CAHORT M 1 13/12/2012 Y Y Y N

Prints:

Animal GIRAFFE keepers JAMES LE M/F M YEAR 9 DOB 10/12/2007 AGE FSM Y PREM ET Y ND AL N EAL N Animal HIPPOS keepers JACKIE LEAN M/F F YEAR 6 DOB 11/12/2007 AGE FSM Y PREM ET N ND AL Y EAL Y Animal ZEBRAS keepers JAMES LEHERN M/F M YEAR 3 DOB 12/12/2007 AGE FSM N PREM ET N ND AL N EAL Y Animal LIONS keepers AMIE CAHORT M/F M YEAR 1 DOB 13/12/2012 AGE FSM Y PREM ET Y ND AL Y EAL N

The @{...} stuff turns the array reference returned by Text::CSV::getline() into a list. The // [] bit in the while loop suppresses a warning by turning the end of file undef into an empty array.

Premature optimization is the root of all job security

In reply to Re: script to do a foreach on an array of strings outputting the title row and each string element vertically by GrandFather
in thread script to do a foreach on an array of strings outputting the title row and each string element vertically by john.tm

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