I want to parse some large files and put them into a format that will go into a database. Not every line has complete information. Some of the information is missing. I need to throw away the descriptions and leave behind the good info ....

The file has lines that look like this: country=US:state=TX:city=Dallas:areacode=214:lat=42.5044:long=-71.1964:timezone=CST:etc...
country=GB:state=EN:city=London:lat=51.50:long=151.22

I want
US:TXallas:214:42.5044:-71.1964:CST
GB:EN:London:none:51.50:151.22


How about splitting each line at : and = into a hash:
       %line = ($wholeline =~ /([^:]+)=([^:]+)/g);
then re-joining a list slice
       $newline = join(":",@line{country,state,city,lat});

Tried it out on your data - worked for me. Note the assignment of a regular expression match straight into a hash (it's very useful that the key and value come in that order in the match), and the use of a hash slice.

---