I'm happy with the resulting script. It's far more clear and far less ugly. Regarding some of the bogosities in my postulate:

• Obviously, the line-by-line processing depends on whether the data file has each group of records on one line, or each record on a separate line. I went for the first assumption (as it makes more real-world sense to me) and you went for the second (as you had the patience to View Source).
• That also lets me get away from the push reference position bit. Not a big loss.
• I thought avoiding the implicit local $_ behavior in the while loop would be more clear for the OP.
• People don't use split and join nearly enough.

Well done.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.