Wow, thanks alot for such quick responses....let me be a little more clear about how an output should look.

Given the data snippet I used above I would like there to be 5 space deliniated rows of output (one for each player, I put commas here so it was clear which items where seperate). These rows will then be sent to a spreadsheet that is happy to import text files that are space deliniated. For example, this would be the perfect output for me for one player:

Player_Name, Case#, Seat#, Speaking_Position, First_response_to_Question_1, Second_response_to_Question_1, Question_For_Round_2, First_response_to_Question_2, Second_response_to_Question_2,

If there is no data for the Second_response field I would like there to be a 0 (for example in my real data people can answer up to 5 times, but usually they only give 2 or 3 responses and I'd like to fill the placeholders for extra responses with 0).
So for Joe the output would look like this ideally (he is third to speak if we start with Jill):

'Joe' , '12345' , '1' , '3' , 'bad' , '0' , 'Next Question' , 'bad' , '0'

And I would get an output like this for each person at the table.

Thanks again for the help, you folks are certainly helping me feel that this is a reasonable thing to accomplish as a beginner.

In reply to Re: New to Perl by Anonymous Monk
in thread New to Perl by Anonymous Monk

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