I should probably have mentioned (but didn't think to) that this is an excerpt from a larger script which does work under strict, is properly declared and if you take a closer look you'll see a hash staring right back out at you!!

Sorry. Now I see. Indeed that long list of variables is mostly confusing (to me). To increase readability you may either

• use a list slice, and optionally put it into a temporary array: since you know which are the fields you're interested in in any case, you can access the (few) ones you want to use as "keys" by numeric subscript and the (many) other ones like aggregates or
• turn those variables into hash(ref) keys (thus possibly adopting a more complex, but easier to deal with data structure) hopefully specified with more whitespace to increase readability

instead.

As an example of the second point I mean something like (but modify at will):

while (<$page>) {
    my %localprop;
    @localprop{ qw(Prop
        colour
        txtcol
        url360
        user
        your_name
        address
        town
        zip_code
        country
        email
        telephone_no
        telephone_no2
        theme
        web_address
        ppemail) } = split /\t/;
    $onprop{ $localprop{Prop} } = \%localprop;
    push @dataarray, $localprop{$user};
}
[download]

As I also mentioned it does do the job I require, but I'd like an opinion from fellow monks as I'm not well skilled at this sort of thing.

Well, a suggestion is above, and the proposed code -although it may not be exactly what you need- is IMHO much less of a mess than the original one...

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