Since you state that the first line in the file is important it might be as well to treat it differently by assigning it to a separate scalar variable. Also, when you split the header to get the column names you could save having to do the shift by assigning the first value to undef which can act as a sort of programmatic bit bucket.

use strict;
use warnings;

use 5.014;

use Data::Dumper;

open my $inFH, q{<}, \ <<EOD or die qq{open: < HEREDOC: $!\n};
# lastname firstname age gender phone
mcgee bobby 27 M 555-555-5555
   
kincaid marl 67 M 555-666-6666
# comment
hofhazards duke 22 M 555-696-6969
EOD

my( $header, @lines ) = <$inFH>;

close $inFH or die qq{close: < HEREDOC: $!\n};

my( undef, @keys ) = split m{\s+}, $header;

foreach my $line ( @lines )
{
    next if $line =~ m{(?x) ^ \s* (?: (?-x:#) | $ )};
    my %hash;
    @hash{ @keys } = split m{\s+}, $line;

    print Data::Dumper->Dumpxs( [ \ %hash ], [ qw{ *hash } ] );
}

[download]

The output.

%hash = (
          'firstname' => 'bobby',
          'lastname' => 'mcgee',
          'phone' => '555-555-5555',
          'age' => '27',
          'gender' => 'M'
        );
%hash = (
          'firstname' => 'marl',
          'lastname' => 'kincaid',
          'phone' => '555-666-6666',
          'age' => '67',
          'gender' => 'M'
        );
%hash = (
          'firstname' => 'duke',
          'lastname' => 'hofhazards',
          'phone' => '555-696-6969',
          'age' => '22',
          'gender' => 'M'
        );

[download]

The technique falls to pieces somewhat when your space-separated files contain fields or headers containing spaces, or a CSV file with commas dotted around. You would then reach for something like Text::CSV.

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In reply to Re: Cool way to parse Space Separated Value and CSV files by johngg
in thread Cool way to parse Space Separated Value and CSV files by greengaroo

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