My first go at dealing with delimited data has not been as straightforward as I expected :(

After stuffing around with various Text/CSV modules and super searching all over the place for an hour or two, I finally gave up and decided to write my own parsing routine.

The data is tab delimited, with the first line being a header.
Each column represents user attributes, and each row represents the data for a particular user.
The only inconsistency in the data (if it is that), is that the header row has a leading hash (#), whereas the rest of the data doesn't.

All I wanted to do is build a hash from the data, in the form $data->{$user}{$attribute}

Although the code I have works, and is only about a dozen lines, I'm disappointed - because:

a) I'm sure this could be done easier with the appropriate module - but I'm damned if I could work out how, and
b) I've used both a flag and a counter, which I'm sure are redundant - but I don't know how to get rid of them

Any advice?
Thanks in advance
--Darren 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $datafile = "stuff.csv";
my @fields;
my $data;
my $flag;

open DATA, "<$datafile" or die "Could not open $datafile:$!\n";
while (<DATA>) {
    chomp();
    # If the flag hasn't been set, this must be the header (first) lin
+e
    if (!$flag) {
        # Throw away the first two fields (#, username) in the header
        (undef, undef, @fields) = (split /\t/);
        $flag++;
    }
    else {
        my ($user, @userdata) = (split /\t/);
        my $i = 0;
        while ($i <= $#fields) {
            $data->{$user}{$fields[$i]} = $userdata[$i];
            $i++;
        }
    }
}
close DATA;

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In reply to Parsing CSV into a hash by McDarren

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