Output particular sections of txt file to csv?

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a large number of files, each of which follows a similar format. In each one there is a section I want to focus on which looks like this

Company Name Acme Inc
Something:
 this
Something else:
 that
Something else:
 etc.
Sales 
2011 Sales:
 €3,000

()
2010 Sales:
 €2,000

()
2011 Growth Rate:
 50.00%

Contact Details
[download]

Essentially I want to parse only the sales figures (and accompanying headings) from this text file into a csv file, so it would look like below

Company Name    2011 Sales    2010 Sales    2011 Growth Rate
Acme Inc        3,000         2,000         50.00%
[download]

Ideally I would love to have a single piece of code to run through the many similar text files and create a single csv file of all this sales data but since I'm completely new to Perl, probably wiser to try get the first file done first! I imagine Perl is the best tool for this task but I'm at a loss how to start so any guidance would be most appreciated!

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Re: Output particular sections of txt file to csv? by choroba (Cardinal) on Apr 09, 2013 at 22:24 UTC
Crossposted at StackOverflow. It is considered polite to inform about crossposting, so that people not attending both sites do not waste their efforts on a problem already solved at the other end of the Internet. لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ	[reply]
Re: Output particular sections of txt file to CSV by Tux (Canon) on Apr 10, 2013 at 07:56 UTC
And your output is not CSV at all. It looks like either plain text or maybe TSV (Tab-Separated-Values). Either show what is actually required or be more specific and correct in the example of the output. Other than that, could you show the code of what you tried so far? Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn	[reply]
Re: Output particular sections of txt file to csv? by Anonymous Monk on Apr 10, 2013 at 02:08 UTC
Hi, A fewe pointers Search the web / this site for 'perl file handling', 'perl regex', 'perl csv', 'perl books' and 'perl tutorials'. That should get you started. Once you have written some code come back and let us give you more meaningful help. J.C.	[reply]

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