Cool. But I don't want to extract a column while printing, the print was just a way of showing the results if someone wanted to run the code.

I want to have an AoA with each element being a column of data ...not that I ever said as much, which, in retrospect, would have avoided lots of time spent by other people trying to figure out what my real goal was.

Sorry.

And thanks for the 'idiom', I added it to my personal archive of neat little bits O'Perl.

OK, so here's how I'd write that: {grin}

my @AoA;
while (<DATA>) {
  my @row = split;
  push @{$AoA[$_]}, $row[$_] for 0..$#row;
}
[download]

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

:) OK, that's obviously a much more standard way to do it than mine... and 20% faster on the one platform I can test it on.

Thanks.