Your language is a bit unclear, so I apologize if the following is off point. I think the key collision is resulting from you wanting to store multiple records at once. Given that you have a fixed number of fields per record, comma delimited, you should be able to just process one record at a time. If you want to deal with them all at once, an array of hashes (perllol) really is the only logical data structure. The thing that strikes me as most odd with the provided log file is that it uses the same delimiter for fields and records. Assuming you have the entire logfile read into $string, the following should be a decent prototype for what you want to do.

while ($string) {
    my @array = split /\,/, $string, 34;
    my %hash = (Date => @array[0..32]);
    store_in_db(%hash);
    if (defined $array[33]) {
        $string = $array[33];
    } else {
        undef $string
    }
}
[download]

actually one record at a time is fine, I don't really follow your example.. ok string contains the data, and @array is going to hold the data seperated into pairs, but why string,34; I don't understand that part, then next line is doing what, I just don't get it. I will look at fixing my data file over the weekend and read re-read perllol hopefully if i read enough it will start making some kind of sense. thanks for looking, perhaps after I have read some more this will make more sense to me.

The magic numbers in my code come in because each line consists of 1 date followed 16 key-value pairs. This adds up to 33 pieces of data per record. If the string has more than these 33 pieces of information, then there must be at least one more record.

Update: You can avoid magic numbers by doing something along the lines of:

my @records = split /,\s*(?=\d{2}\/\d{2}\/\d{4}\s\d{2}\:\d{2}\:\d{2}\s
+[AP]M)/, $string;
foreach (@records) {
    my %hash = (Date => split /\,\s*/);
    insert_into_db(%hash);
}
[download]