I second the recommendation for a database. DBD::SQLite is easy to install, so are DBD::CSV and DBD::AnyData the later two would allow you to store the information in human-readable text files if that's a requirement. None of the three requires installation or maintenance of a separate database server. The basic design you need is one table that lists company names and addresses and a second table that has the company name as a field. Then, rather than storing the company names twice, you simply join the two tables when you want to access the information. If databases and SQL are a mystery to you, you could use AnyData which provides a tied hash interface to files in many formats.

For, example if you have two files like this: 

[company.csv]
company,address
foo,NY
bar,CA

[employee.csv]
name,company
Joe,foo
Sue,bar

[download]
This script will print out each person with their company name and address: 
#!perl -w
use strict;
use AnyData;
my $company  = adTie('CSV','company.csv');
my $employee = adTie('CSV','employee.csv');
while (my $person = each %$employee) {
    printf "%s : %s :%s\n"
          , $person->{name}
          , $person->{company}
          , $company->{$person->{company}}->{address}
          ;
}

[download]

In reply to Re: need help with data manipulation by jZed
in thread need help with data manipulation by alicesheerin

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.