The parsing of the CSV data as such should not be too hard a problem. Just use Text::CSV_XS or Text::CSV. Now the only thing left to do is to come up with a criterium (or criteria) than make the headers stand out/be different from "normal" data.

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new ({ binary => 1, auto_diag => 1});
my @hdr;
while (my $row = $csv->getline ($fh)) {
    # example: header lines start with A-Z, data doesn't
    if (!@hdr or $row->[0] =~ m/^[A-Z]/) {
        @hdr = @{$row};
        next;
        }
    # just an example
    my %hash;
    @hash{@hdr} = @$row;
    }
[download]

Well, you could have checked the format of your text, because it propably doesn't look like you intended.

If you would have used <c></c>-tags around your sample data, the format would be visible.

Directly below the form fields, where you compose your questions, are some text and several links, which advise you how to mark up your question, code and data.

With code-Tags your examples could look like this:

your 1st example:

heading 1,    heading 2,    heading 3
data,         data,         data
data,         data,         data
[download]

your 2nd example:

heading 1,   heading 2
data,        data
data,

heading 3
data

heading 4,     heading 5
data,          data
[download]

I didn't even spot the change in field numbers in the OP! If that is a real criterium:

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new ({ binary => 1, auto_diag => 1});
my @hdr;
while (my $row = $csv->getline ($fh)) {
    # example:
    if ( # a change in number of columns
         @hdr != @$row
         or
         # first column matches header criterium
         $row->[0] =~ m/^[A-Z]/
         ) {
        @hdr = @{$row};
        next;
        }
    # just an example
    my %hash;
    @hash{@hdr} = @$row;
    }
[download]


Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

It worked! I think that I should be able to get the rest of what I need from here. Thanks a ton!!

I may have spoke to soon. It appears that this is pulling my data and structuring it correctly when I output to a txt file.

However I need to be able to pull the specific columns and im not sure how to do that. I want to be able to do something like:

print hash->{header_name} and it will give me all of the keys under that column.

So again, I have columns in a csv file that are kind of "stacked" on top of each other, meaning there is not a single header row at the top of the file, the header for each column is on different lines of the file.

The headers are always enclosed in <>, so I want to scan through my csv pull out the headers and then put the corresponding values in that particular column into a hash that I can read out by doing something like hash->{header} this would give me all of the values in the column.

Sometimes there are 100 rows under a header and sometimes there is just 1. Thanks again for your help, sorry if this doesnt make sense, it is kind of confusing.

Let me try to explain again what the csv looks like...

<header>,   <header>,  <header>
value,      value,     value
value,                 value
value,
value,

<header>,   <header>
value,      value
value,      value
value,
[download]

This goes on like this randomly through out the csv file, I hope that this little picture makes some more sense. I think that we are on the right track but not here yet! Thanks again for everyones help!