would this layout would be an easier an approach to parse

Maybe, depends on what pages 2 and 3 are like. Are you parsing many reports all formatted the same ?. Or is the 3 pages just a small sample of the real report. 

#!perl
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $infile = 'report1.txt';

# date address description
my $fmt   = "A16 A38 A*";
my @data  = ();
my $recno = -1;
my $flag  = 0;

open IN,'<',$infile or die "$infile $!";
while (<IN>){
  chomp;
  next unless /\S/;
  $flag = 0 if /Page \d of \d/;
  
  my ($date,$addr,$desc) = unpack $fmt,$_;
  if ( $date =~ /\d\d.\d\d.20\d\d/ ){
    $flag = 1;  
    ++$recno;  
    $data[$recno] = [ $date,$addr,$desc ];
  } elsif ($flag) {
    $data[$recno][1] .= ' '.$addr if $addr;
    $data[$recno][2] .= ' '.$desc if $desc; 
  }
}
close IN;
print scalar(@data)." records read\n";
print Dumper \@data;

[download]
poj

In reply to Re^3: creating array of hashes from input file by poj
in thread creating array of hashes from input file by chimiXchanga

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