Thanks Dave for the while <FH> loop, I need to protect against blank lines and spurious white space that could show up in the data. No doubt the file will edited in Note pad (on widows 98), and I want to put the data in to the hash in a clean format. and since the this is basically a price list names of the product (the keys for the hash) might have spaces: new model , 20 I do want them quoted: "new model"
also of note Data::Dumper; is built in to OSX! Joy! Thanks for any refinement on the code below. Dave ( kora musician / audiophile / web master @ cora connection / Ft. Worth, TX, USA) ------ #!/usr/bin/perl -w use Data::Dumper; use strict; my %prices; my $data = "/Users/dowda/Desktop/tmp test/test.txt"; open (FH,$data) || die "could not open $data $!"; while( <FH> ) { s/^\s*(.+)\s*$/$1/; # clean the line next if m/^\W+/; # blank lines my( $k, $v ) = split /,/; $k =~ s/^\s*(.+)\s*$/$1/; # clean the hash key $v =~ s/^\s*(.+)\s*$/$1/; # clean the value $prices{qq($k)} = $v; } close FH; for my $key (keys %prices) { print "$key = $prices{$key}\n"; } print "\n\n" , Dumper \%prices; __DATA__ model-old ,22 model new, 34 model new with crome, 48 last years model,10 model 2a , 100 ============================================== Cora Connection: Your West African Music Source Resources, Recordings, Instruments & More! <http://www.coraconnection.com/> ============================================== -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]