Thank you for taking the time to assist me with this.I want to learn the HOH method, so I will try to use that in my solution with your aid.Using "print Dumper \%hash;" works and te HOH has all the info I need but I can't seem to print it out in a format I want . name device(s) <space> year My entire code is 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $infile = 'test_file.txt';
open (IN,'<',$infile) || die ("Could not open $infile : $!");
my $name;
my %hash = ();

while (<IN>){
  s/^\s+|\s+$//g; # trim leading/trailing spaces
  my ($col1,$col2,$col3) = split /\s+/,$_,4;
  if ($col1 eq 'name'){
    $name = $col2;
    
 } elsif ($col1 eq 'device') 
    {
    push @{$hash{$name}},$col2,$col3;
  } 
else 
{
    # skip line
  }

##
##
}
close IN;



#print Dumper \%hash;

foreach my $line (keys %hash)
{
print "$line\n";

    foreach my $sit (keys %{$hash{$line}})
        {
        print "$hash{$line}{$sit}\t$sit";
            }
}

[download]

DATA

name Brian
device Ipad 2001
device  iphone 2000
number 2
name Jason
device computer 2011
number 1
name Andrew
device ipad 1999
device iphone 1990

[download]

In reply to Re^4: perl parsing by cbtshare
in thread perl parsing by cbtshare

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