Hope the Community can bear with me as I muddle with the vocabulary since I am not really sure if I am going about this the correct way.

My question is as follows:

If I had some sample data in the form of delimited text, in this case comma-delimited (eg. canned_data.txt ) and the format looked roughly like this:

name,age,occupa tion,status
"joe blow",21,salesm an,married
"hanna montana,19,ente rtainer,single...

KevinADC:

Thanks for the prompt response and toleration!!!

Now that you have shown me the correct way to extract that column into my new text file how would one going about parsing the integers out of the results:

ie) if I had

44:45:44
12/11/11
9:9:0

and I wanted the first number parsed out of each line.

I was looking to see if a mySQL query...

Let me ask for forgiveness right from the get-go. I am a newbie to Perl and found that it would be a beneficial tool for my line of profession and I am trying to teach myself with on-line resources.

My question to the community, and I've seen variations on what I am trying to achieve, is the following scenario:

I have a comma-delimited text file (metadata_outpu t.txt) saved in a given directory (eg \usr\home\proje ct\dump)...