Lunchtime homework is always fun when you are learning all of this stuff (like I am), and dvergin has already done all of the hard work / taken us 90% of the way there. So here is a pass at with most of what he did then just played with the grep statement to get it to work as discussed in the thread:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

open(DATA,"D:/JUNK/commafile.csv");

my @friends;
my @raw_list = <DATA>;
chomp @raw_list;
for (@raw_list) {
   my @bits = split(/,/, $_);
   my $sucker= {FIRSTNAME => $bits[0],
                LASTNAME  => $bits[1],
                HAIRCOLOR => $bits[2]};
   push @friends, $sucker;
}

my @real_friends = grep
  { lc(substr($_->{FIRSTNAME},0,1)) eq "j"
    &&  $_->{HAIRCOLOR} eq "brown"  }
  @friends;

foreach (@real_friends) {
  print "Only real friends have \'$_->{HAIRCOLOR}\' hair ";
  print " and names which begin with 'j' like my friend ";
  print "\'$_->{FIRSTNAME} $_->{LASTNAME}\'\n";
  if (($_->{FIRSTNAME} eq "John") &&
     ($_->{LASTNAME} eq "Kennedy")) {
    print "  Hey 'nandaya' you Novice level chump, ";
    print "I know John Kennedy, \n";
    print "  I worked with John Kennedy, and 'nandeya', ";
    print "you're no friend of John Kennedy.\n";
  }
}




__DATA__
John,Brown,red
Fred,Flintstone,black
Jane,Brown,blond
Betty, Rubble,black
John,Kennedy,brown
Jodi,Brown,brown
Bill,Black,blond
June,Green,brown
John,McEnroe,brown
Erin,White,brown
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nandeya