I saw your question about accounting for Brian having more than one of the same device. Here is yet another solution... I didn't use a HoH in my first solution partly because that can be a difficult concept for beginners.

In general I don't recommend approaches that require reading the entire input file into memory and then parsing that memory copy of the file because that often essentially means that the data is being "handled" in some way more than once and can take a lot of memory in the process. Some of the files that I work with can get quite large.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my %devices;         # a HOH Hash of Hash {name}{device}
my $current_name;

while ( my $line = <DATA>)
{
   $current_name = $1 if ($line =~ m/^name\s+(\w+)\s+/);
   
   if ( (my $device) = $line =~ /^device\s+([\w\s]+)\n/)
   {
      $device =~ s/[ ]+/ /g;  # multiple-space to a single space
      $devices{$current_name}{$device}++;
   }
}

# print the %devices hash - requires 2 loops

foreach my $name (sort keys %devices)  
{
   print "$name:\n";
   
   foreach my $device (keys %{$devices{$name}})
   {
       print "    $devices{$name}{$device}\t$device\n";   
   }

}

=Prints
Andrew:
    1    ipad 2009
Brian:
    3    ipad 2001
ryan:
    1    ipad 2005
    1    cell 2009
=cut


__DATA__
socks  something
name    Brian
shirt  yellow
socks   black
device ipad  2001
device ipad  2001
device ipad   2001
tag   no
tag    0   
name    Andrew
shirt  orange
socks   black
device ipad 2009
tag   no
tag    0
name    ryan
shirt  blue
socks   black
device ipad  2005
device cell   2009
tag   yes
tag    1

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In reply to Re: perl parsing by Marshall
in thread perl parsing by cbtshare

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