First let me say thank you for the wealth of good information. I have been doing a lot of reading in areas of various parts of perl that have been called out in each of your replies. Terms like JSON, etc. Again, I am new and its a learning process. Using a personal project as a referance point for me makes it a little bit fun. I think the first response on using the map and undef helped me the most for now in understanding how I can carve up my data, but for some reason in my original post I think my example got butchered and I ran into another problem. It looks the editor field on this website does some strange wrapping of the line I am trying to work with. The end of the data in tstatcollect has a subsection that seems to break the original splits. 


{"temp":75.50,"tmode":2,"fmode":0,"override":0,"hold":0,"t_cool":75.00
+,"tstate":0,"fstate":0,"time":{"day":4,"hour":13,"minute":49},"t_type
+_p
ost":0}

[download]
My working code now looks like 

#! /usr/bin/perl

open (FILE, '/home/julian/tstatcollect');
while (<FILE>) {
chomp;
(undef,$temp, undef,$tmode, undef,$fmode, undef,$override, undef,$hold
+, undef,$tcool, undef,$tstate, undef,$fstate, undef,$time, undef,$day
+, undef,$hour, undef,$minute, undef,$t_type_post,) = map split (":"),
+ split (","), ;
print "Temperature:  $temp\n";
print "Tmode:    $tmode\n";
print "Fmode:    $fmode\n";
print "Override:    $override\n";
print "Hold:    $hold\n";
print "tcool:    $tcool\n";
print "tstate:     $tstate\n";
print "fstate:    $fstate\n";
print "day:    $day\n";
print "hour:    $hour\n";
print "minute:    $minute\n";
print "t_type_post    $t_type_post\n";
    
print "________\n";
}
close (FILE);
exit;

[download]
With an output now of 
Temperature:  75.50
Tmode:    2
Fmode:    0
Override:    0
Hold:    0
tcool:    75.00
tstate:     0
fstate:    0
day:    "hour"
hour:    "minute"
minute:    "t_type_post"
t_type_post    "

[download]
It seems as though when the regular format changes to something it doesnt expect the continuing parsing of the data goes to trash? My thought being is do I need do break the data into two forms. One with the first portion and another with the date time nested portion? I also liked the statement made earlier about collecting the data regardless of where its at with regards to the delimiter? Interesting. I apprecaite all the help and its giving me a lot of reading and researching to do for this weekend. I know there is a ton of resources and books written on the subject but without a referance point to start it made it hard to know what I was looking for. This gives me more to work with. Not looking for answers to the problem as much as I am looking for places to start learning. Thanks again. Julian

In reply to Re: Proper use of split by th3j4ckl3
in thread Proper use of split by th3j4ckl3

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