Hi guys, I'm just starting learning Perl. Here is my Q. I want to write a program to read in the following fixed width data file into a data structure of a real array of hashes, the data file for example called "clients.dat" is like following: 
Surname L20, First Name L20, Town L20 
-------------------------------------------------- 
Chaplin      Charlie         Basel 
Estevez      Emilio Santa    Manica 
Sarte        Jean Paul       Montmarte 
Rikard       Frank           Amsterdam 
Rodin        Paul            Montmarte

[download]
With many help from you guys here I can read in the file but now I have two more question.
Q1:I want to print all the lines sorted by the Town. Like this 
Town         Surname       Firstname

Basel        Chaplin       Charlie          
Manica       Estevez       Emilio Santa   
Montmarte    Sarte         Jean Paul  
Montmarte    Rodin         Paul 
Amsterdam    Rikard        Frank

[download]
Q2: user will input a town name eg.Basel then it should print out the surname of eceryone who lives there. I did something like this: 
my $data = "clients.dat";
open (DAT, $data) or die "\"$data\" not existed or can't be opened!\n"
+;
my @client;  # make this an array, not a hash;
my @fields = qw/surname firstname town/;

while (<DAT>) {
    next if ( /^Surname/ or /^-/ );
    my @values = unpack 'A20A20A20', $_;
    my %entry = map { $fields[$_] => $values[$_] } ( 0..$#fields );
    push @client, \%entry;
}

my @towns;
my $client;
foreach my $client (@client){
    push @towns, "$client->{'town'}";
}
my @sorted_towns = sort @towns;

foreach my $key (@sorted_towns) {
    my @elems = $key;
    my $client = $client->[$elems[1]-1];
    print "$client->{'town'} $client->{'surname'} $client->{'firstname
+'}";
    
}

#Print out the surname of people live in the town
print "Please enter a town name: ";
my $a = <STDIN>;
my $town;
if ($a =~ /[Basel Manica Montmarte Amsterdam]/) {
           my $client->{'town'} = $a;
                 print ${$client}[$town]
} 

else{
        die "Invalid town name supplied: $a";
}

[download]
But this doesnt work somehow. Can anyone help please

In reply to An REAL array of hashes by fseng

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