Take a look at the data structures cookbook. Your basic approach should be to build an array of arrays (actually array references). You can then loop over your array to generate a new array.

Here's an example of working with an AoA. In this example, key things to understand are how data structures are built up in perl, and how to use the map function to make a new array out of an existing one. If you can't grok map right away, you can use a foreach or while loop instead.

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

use Data::Dumper;

# Generate primary data array
my @data = map {[ split ]} <DATA>;

print Dumper \@data;

my $first = $data[0];

my @first_vs_x = map { [
    "$first->[0] vs $data[$_][0]",  # Generate new name entry
    $first->[1] - $data[$_][1],     # Fred - X
    $first->[2] + $data[$_][2],     # Fred + X
] } 1..$#data;  # use indexes from 1 to last in @data

print Dumper \@first_vs_x;

__DATA__
Fred   15 20 
Wilma  23 19
Barney  1 22
Betty  99 63

[download]

It's worth noting that this example keeps everything in memory, and for large data sets, you'll need to use a different approach.


TGI says moo

In reply to Re: processing columns of text by TGI
in thread processing columns of text by sitnalta

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