There are number of ways to do it with straight regular expressions, but the technology you are feeding this into (and thus the necessary input-output mapping) is unfamiliar to me. Parsing one of your lines may be as easy as /^\s*(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s*$/, but maybe this needs the m modifier depending on context. This particular expression will fail on all lines other than your data lines, since all it does is (thanks to YAPE::Regex::Explain): 
The regular expression:

(?m-isx:^\s*(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s*$)

matches as follows:
  
NODE                     EXPLANATION
----------------------------------------------------------------------
(?m-isx:                 group, but do not capture (with ^ and $
                         matching start and end of line) (case-
                         sensitive) (with . not matching \n)
                         (matching whitespace and # normally):
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  ^                        the beginning of a "line"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  \s*                      whitespace (\n, \r, \t, \f, and " ") (0 or
                           more times (matching the most amount
                           possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  (                        group and capture to \1:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    \S+                      non-whitespace (all but \n, \r, \t, \f,
                             and " ") (1 or more times (matching the
                             most amount possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of \1
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  \s+                      whitespace (\n, \r, \t, \f, and " ") (1 or
                           more times (matching the most amount
                           possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  (                        group and capture to \2:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
    \S+                      non-whitespace (all but \n, \r, \t, \f,
                             and " ") (1 or more times (matching the
                             most amount possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  )                        end of \2
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  \s*                      whitespace (\n, \r, \t, \f, and " ") (0 or
                           more times (matching the most amount
                           possible))
----------------------------------------------------------------------
  $                        before an optional \n, and the end of a
                           "line"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
)                        end of grouping
----------------------------------------------------------------------

[download]
and can be shown to work on this example with 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

$_ = <<'EOT';
Port 1 Database Assignments

  Region    Data Type   # Records

  GLOBAL    --
  LOCAL     --
  BUF       --
  D1        Unused
  D2        Unused
  D3        Unused
  D4        Unused
  D5        Unused
  D6        Unused
  D7        Unused
  D8        Unused
  A1        Unused
  A2        Unused
  A3        Unused
  USER      Unused
EOT

my %hash;
while (/^\s*(\S+)\s+(\S+)\s*$/mg) {
   $hash{$1} = $2;
}
print Dumper \%hash;

[download]
However, it'll break pretty quickly if your input is not representative; e.g. if you Region or Data Type contain white space (this looks fixed width to me) or if # Records is not null.

#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

In reply to Re^3: Regex help by kennethk
in thread Regex help by jayto

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