Howdy :)

Just reading between the lines a little... if you are going to store this stuff in a hash, then I'm guessing that at some later stage you'll want to use the information in the hash. At which time you'll probably need to separate out the different user "attributes" (Real Name, email, etc).

So, why not do this at the start?

Because your data appears to be quite well formed, then using split seems the natural way to go, and create a HoH. Something like this: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my %user_info;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my ($user, $attribs) = $_ =~ m/^(\S+)\s+(.+)$/;

    my ($realname, $email, $foo, $bar, undef)
        = split /\|/, $attribs;

    $user_info{$user}{'Real Name'} = $realname;
    $user_info{$user}{'Email'} = $email;
    $user_info{$user}{'Foo'} = $foo;
    $user_info{$user}{'Bar'} = $bar;
}
__DATA__
username    Real Name|email@gmail.com|2|30|
fred        Fred Bloggs|fbloggs@gmail.com|3|27|
harryp      Harry Potter|harry@gmail.com|5|32|

[download]

You could then do something like this: 

foreach my $user (keys %user_info) {
    print "Username:$user Real Name:$user_info{$user}{'Real Name'}\n";
}

[download]

Which would give you: 

Username:harryp Real Name:Harry Potter
Username:fred Real Name:Fred Bloggs
Username:username Real Name:Real Name

[download]

Note that the above code could be shortened significantly, but I've deliberately kept it verbose so that it's obvious what's going on. It also doesn't include any sanity-checking on your data, but that could easily be added in.

Hope this helps,
Darren :)

In reply to Re: regex to split a line by McDarren
in thread regex to split a line by Anonymous Monk

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