I personally believe that you're still failing to specify how is it failing to "work." Because by all means it should! That is, it should if the input file you're running your code is actually as regular as you suggested. If it isn't, then you may run into troubles. Incidentally I've just answered a question which is virtually the same as yours except that the code of the person asking it is some orders of magnitude worse than yours! (Which is a way to say: compliments for your programming skills after only a week of Perl programming!) Actually, in the linked post I suggest another technique to achieve the same, which is even more "sensible" to the format of the input file, for a broken record may mess up all of the following keys and values...