note linuxer <p>Hi, <p>I just read this thread again and saw your reply. <p>Assuming, that an empty string is not a valid value, I came up with this: <code> #! /usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; use Text::CSV_XS; my $csv = Text::CSV_XS->new({ binary => 1, allow_whitespace => 1, }) or die "Cannot use CSV: " . Text::CSV_XS->error_diag(); # for testing; in real world, open file and use that handle my $fh = \*DATA; my (%hash, @hdr); while ( my $row = $csv->getline( $fh ) ) { # header not yet defined? or 1st cell starts with '<' ==> use row as header if ( !@hdr || $row->[0] =~ m/^</ ) { @hdr = @{$row}; next; } # otherwise try to process data else { for my $i ( 0 .. $#hdr ) { # only add those values which contain at least one character # so: no "undef"s or empty strings in result # if empty strings are OK or wanted, try to replace length() with defined() push @{ $hash{$hdr[$i]} }, ( length $row->[$i] ? $row->[$i] : () ); } } } # check created data structure require Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys = 1; print Data::Dumper::Dumper( \%hash ); __DATA__ <A1>, <A2>, <A3> a1, aa1, aaa1 a2, , aaa2 a3, aa3 a4 <B1>, <B2> b1, bb1 b2, bb2 b3 </code> That produced a result like this: <code> $VAR1 = { '<A1>' => [ 'a1', 'a2', 'a3', 'a4' ], '<A2>' => [ 'aa1', 'aa3' ], '<A3>' => [ 'aaa1', 'aaa2' ], '<B1>' => [ 'b1', 'b2', 'b3' ], '<B2>' => [ 'bb1', 'bb2' ] }; </code> 901226 905085