Although Perl formats can't be used for input, reading in text and extracting data from it is exactly the kind of task that Perl was designed for. Some Perl features that may be especially useful in your script include split, substr, unpack, and of course regular expressions.

Here's a very simple script that does something like that: 

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my %data;

while (<>) {
  next if /Header/;
  next if /Footer/;

  my($id, $name) = split ' ', $_;
  $data{$id} = $name;
}

[download]
I hope that will get you started!

In reply to Re: Input Formats by chipmunk
in thread Input Formats by jakeeboy

Title:
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