http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=384366


in reply to Tricky Problem

As far as managing the structure of the data goes, it looks like this should be sufficient:

#! /usr/bin/perl -w use strict; use Data::Dumper; my %data; while ( <DATA> ) { chomp; my ( $begin, $end, $tag, @vals ) = split /[-,:]/; push @{$data{$begin}{$tag}{end_vals}}, $end; push @{$data{$begin}{$tag}{vals}}, @vals; } print Dumper \%data; __DATA__ 100-233,MA,150:250 100-344,MA,350: 200-400,ER, 200-300,ER,576

I'll leave the formatting up to you. :-)


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DamnDirtyApe
Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who
would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity.
            --Friedrich Nietzsche