Hello Everyone, I am pretty new to Perl, but have been doing some independent learning. I am working on a project in which I am trying to parse through some data. But, I have gotten stuck on what seems to be an easy problem to fix, except I don't know how! :) I am trying to use the following code, but now my user IDs actually have NA in the front of them (ie. NA12324). How can I either: do a step before this to remove the NA, OR get this code to accept this sort of ID? I hope this makes sense...thanks in advance! 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;

my $inFile = 'fanca.txt';

open (IN, $inFile) or die "open $inFile: $!";

my %user;

while (my $line = <IN>) {
    next unless $line =~ m{^(\S+) (\d+) (.*)};
    my ($site, $userID, $data, $data2) = ($1, $2, $3, $4);
    
    $user{$userID}{$site} = $data, $data2;
}

close(IN) or die "close $inFile: $!";

my $outfile = "parsingoutput_for_fanca.txt";
open(REPORT, ">$outfile") or die "open >$outfile: $!";

foreach my $userID (sort {$a <=> $b} keys %user) {
    my %sites = %{$user{$userID}};

    my $line1 =  'SITES';
    my $line2 = "$userID";

    while (my ($site, $data, $data2) = each %sites) {
        $line1 .= ' ' x (length($line2)-length($line1));
        $line2 .= ' ' x (length($line1)-length($line2));

        #add on next site
        $line1 .= ' '. ' ' . $site;
        $line2 .= ' '. ' '. $data . ' ' . ' '. $data2;
    }

    print REPORT $line1 . "\n";
    print REPORT $line2 . "\n";
    print REPORT "\n";
}

close (REPORT) or die "close $outfile: $!";

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2006-10-28 Retitled by GrandFather, as per Monastery guidelines
Original title: 'Should be easy....'

In reply to Modifying a regex by seni

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