I'm rather confused by your logic. I'm also confused by your problem domain.

You have a file. It will have "EOS" at the last line. (Or, is it between each line? I'll assume the former.) You want to read its data.

Now, what you're doing is creating a string, delimited in a certain fashion, then splitting on that delimitor immediately into a list. Why not just create a list?

Also, your logic in your parser is, well, sketchy. 

my @data;
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    next if /EOS$/;

    s/"\s?"/\t/g;
    s/"//g;
    push @data, [ split /\t/, $_ ];
}

foreach (@data) {
    my %hash;
    @hash{qw(First Last Addr City State Phone)} = @$_;

    print "$hash{First}, $hash{Last}\n";
    print "$hash{Addr}\n";
    print "$hash{City},$hash{State}\n";
    print "$hash{Phone}\n";
    print "\n";
}

[download]
Basically, read a line. Skip it if we're reading an EOS. (We, essentially, don't care about them as all our data is on one line.) Then, convert the "" or " " into tabs, then remove the extra ", then split on tab and push a listref with our data onto our master data list.

Then, when we read, we put the data for that line into a hashslice, then access the hash. :-)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

In reply to Re: Reading in data that is by dragonchild
in thread Reading in data that is by basicdez

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