Thank very much .Your solution is quite similar to that of poj. I will attempt to explain what is being done and then how I used what I understood to try and arrive at the solution I need.

while (<IN>){
 #remove spaces from the beginning or the end of the file
  s/^\s+|\s+$//g;

# splits the files based on columns based on space and limit the amoun
+t split by 4
  my ($col1,$col2,$col3) = split /\s+/,$_,4;

#checks to see if the word name is matched to get the variable next ov
+er which would be the actual name , then put it in variable $name
  if ($col1 eq 'name'){
    $name = $col2;

#checks to see if the word device is matched to get the variable next 
+over which would be the actual type, then next over is another attrib
+ute(not on the example)
 } elsif ($col1 eq 'device')
        {
##Here the push name, device type and other variable into a hash
    push @{$hash{$name}},$col2, $col3;
  }
else
{
    # skip line
  }
}
close IN;

[download]
#prints everything print Dumper \%hash

My issue now comes when I need to print out the content in a structure way, or into a file name device $col3 device $col3 I can sort through hash and get the name only, not all the other attributes.But why? I put them all into the hash right?

foreach my $line(keys %hash)
{
print $line
}

[download]

I believe you are doing somewhat similar

##defining the fields you want including the file, HEADER would be the
+ first field and if name or device then KEY is the next value over an
+d VALUE the next
use constant {
    IN_FILE => 'pm_1200636_text.txt',
    HEADER => 0,
    KEY    => 1,
    VALUE  => 2,
};

my %parsed;

{
    open my $fh, '<', IN_FILE;

    my $name;

    while (<$fh>) {
        my @fields = split;

        if ($fields[HEADER] eq 'name') {
            $name = $fields[KEY];
            next;
        }

[download]

This is the part that gives me issues since I need to print the values in a specified format, so data dumper wouldnt work , any help please?

 if ($fields[HEADER] eq 'device') {
            push @{$parsed{$name}{$fields[KEY]}}, $fields[VALUE];
            next;
        }
    }
}

[download]

In reply to Re^2: perl parsing by cbtshare
in thread perl parsing by cbtshare

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