in reply to Looping and Grouping: there must be a better way!

I would put the records into groups, and then loop through the groups, each as a single entity to decide if it needs a header record. For you, the trick is preserving order so we can build the header record using data about the previous group. Luckily there's Tie::IxHash:
use Tie::IxHash; tie my %group, Tie::IxHash; ## group them by ID, preserving the order seen for (@records) { my $id = $_->{ID}; push @{ $group{$id} }, $_; } ## put special header at beginning of groups larger than 1 my $last_id; while (my ($curr_id, $records) = each %group) { unshift @$records, { ... } if @$records > 1; $last_id = $curr_id; } ## flatten everything out my @complete_list = map @$_, values %group;
Notice when you put the header record onto the beginning of the group, you can use $last_id, $curr_id, $records, and even $group{$last_id} to generate it.

blokhead