Hi Dave, Sorry I wasn't clear in my post. The piece of data below is from the sql. It's not a text datafile. So your solution doesn't work. This is the piece of code I used to retrieve data from the database and save the output into @records.

while ( $rec = $sth->fetchrow_hashref() ) {
 push @records, $rec;
}

@records now contains:

name | passed | failed | pending
------+--------+--------+---------
xxx | null | 2 | null
xxx | 30 | null | null
xxx | null | null | 10
yyy| 6 | null | null
[download]