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!

Hi,

I just read this thread again and saw your reply.

Assuming, that an empty string is not a valid value, I came up with this:

#! /usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use Text::CSV_XS;

my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({ binary => 1, allow_whitespace => 1, }) 
  or die "Cannot use CSV: " . Text::CSV_XS->error_diag();

# for testing; in real world, open file and use that handle
my $fh = \*DATA;

my (%hash, @hdr);

while ( my $row = $csv->getline( $fh ) ) { 

    # header not yet defined? or 1st cell starts with '<' ==> use row 
+as header
    if ( !@hdr || $row->[0] =~ m/^</ ) {
        @hdr = @{$row};
        next;
    }
    # otherwise try to process data
    else {
        for my $i ( 0 .. $#hdr ) {
            # only add those values which contain at least one charact
+er
            # so: no "undef"s or empty strings in result
            # if empty strings are OK or wanted, try to replace length
+() with defined()
            push @{ $hash{$hdr[$i]} }, ( length $row->[$i] ? $row->[$i
+] : () );
        }
    }
}

# check created data structure
require Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1;
print Data::Dumper::Dumper( \%hash );

__DATA__
<A1>,   <A2>,   <A3>
a1,     aa1,    aaa1
a2,        ,    aaa2
a3,     aa3
a4

<B1>,   <B2>
b1,     bb1
b2,     bb2
b3
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That produced a result like this:

$VAR1 = {
          '<A1>' => [
                      'a1',
                      'a2',
                      'a3',
                      'a4'
                    ],
          '<A2>' => [
                      'aa1',
                      'aa3'
                    ],
          '<A3>' => [
                      'aaa1',
                      'aaa2'
                    ],
          '<B1>' => [
                      'b1',
                      'b2',
                      'b3'
                    ],
          '<B2>' => [
                      'bb1',
                      'bb2'
                    ]
        };
[download]