u were right about that, silly me and yet, now i have an incredibly trivial problem. For some reason, when i leave it as printing to the command window, it spews out the exact stuff that i want, yet when i tell it to print to a filehandle, the file is empty afterwards... here's my code:

#! /usr/bin/perl
print "File Location?";
my $data_file = <>;
open(DATA, $data_file);
my @list;
while (<DATA>) {
  chomp;
  my (%hash, @rest);
  ($hash{first}, $hash{date}, @rest) = split(",", $_);
  for my $r (@rest) {
    my ($k, $v) = split(' ', $r, 2);
    $hash{$k} = $v;
  }
  push(@list, \%hash);
};
my %seen;
for (@list) { for (keys %$_) { $seen{$_}++ } };
delete $seen{first};
delete $seen{date};
my @allkeys = ('first', 'date', sort keys %seen);
my @keys = (sort keys %seen);
open(DATAOUT, ">1.temp");
while(<DATAOUT>) {
for my $h (@list) {
print DATAOUT join(",", $h->{first}, $h->{date},
            map { $_." ".$h->{$_} } @keys), "\n";
}
}
[download]

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.