I'm not quite sure I don't understand your question: usually input data are pre-existing, and the program has to be written to process them.

What you seem to want is the first two fields of your input data. There are, of course, several ways to do that. What I would probably do would look like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $input_file = pop(@ARGV) or die "Please enter file name on command 
+line\n";

open(my $input, "<", $input_file) or die "Could not open $input_file b
+ecause $!\n";

while(<$input>) {
        my @line = split(/\s*\|\s*/, $_);
        print join(' | ', @line[0..1]) . "\n";
}
close ($input);

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emc

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In reply to Re: formating data input by swampyankee
in thread formating data input by manu7495

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