You are looking for symbolic references, which means not using 'use strict', which is usually a bad idea. Why not store all the data in one hash of hashes?
use strict; my %names; while (<>) { my ($label, $name1, $name2, $name3, $name4) = split /:/; $names{$label}{$name1} = $name2; $names{$label}{$name3} = $name4; }
And the non strict (bad, dangerous, don't do this) version:
# Untested, because I rarely use symbolic refs :) while (<>) { my ($label, $name1, $name2, $name3, $name4) = split /:/; $$label{$name1} = $name2; $$label{name3} = $name4; }

In reply to Re: parsing text file into a hash? by runrig
in thread parsing text file into a hash? by ralfthewise

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