Any ideas how to tackle this problem is welcome

Create a hash of arrays, where the hash keys are the elements one the first line, and the array elements are values from each column respectively. Read perldata, perlfaq4.

 
$ perl -w 641872.pl
$VAR1 = {
          'EYES' => [
                      'BLUE',
                      'BROWN'
                    ],
          'AGE' => [
                     '32',
                     '54'
                   ],
          'HAIR' => [
                      'BLONDE',
                      'BROWN'
                    ]
        };
[download]

Update: The implementation is intentionally excluded since this is an obvious homework question. Memory concerns are considered out of scope. In real life I would probably use cut (Unix).