What you'll learn

In this part of the tutorial we'll delve into one of the many things that Perl does best -- reading data from files. We'll look at reading comma separated value files (CSV) as an example; we'll look at more regular expression concepts to enable us to clean and check the data we read, and we'll investigate Perl's ability to build complex data structures, allowing us to represent ultimately even the most complicated data in our programs' memory, where we can manipulate it to our hearts' content. We'll also look at web scraping with Perl; the art of collecting data automatically from Internet sites -- where it's legal to do so, of course.