When you say working with both names and values, what are you trying to do with them? add all the second coulmn numbers for each name up? sort by something? what? depending on exactly what you are going to be doing with the data your options can be way different. for instance if you want to add all of the numbers up for each name you can do this:
my %names;
open (FILE, "data") or die "Cant open data: $!\n";
while (<DATA>) {
chomp;
my ($tempname, $tempnum) = split / /;
$names{"$tempname"} += $tempnum;
}
close FILE;
Or if you need to track all of the numbers seperatly you could use an HoA (Hash of ArrayRefs) such that you
push (@{$names{"$tempname"}},$tempnum); values into it. let us know what you plan to do with the data and we can get you some decent data structs. =)
-Waswas
