Guess I have to understand that script to rewrite it in Python. :->

First, gethead.pl reads through the file until it finds a line which starts with a '!'. In which case it creates a list of names of the form '$'column name:

        $format = '$' . join(', $', split(/,/, $first_line));
        print $format . "\n";

Yields:

> ./r.pl r.txt
$started, $ended, $title, $company, $description

The magic really occurs in the main processing loop:

do main'read_txtfile_format(*LNG_FILE, *languages);

lang: while (<LNG_FILE>) {
        next lang if (/^#/ || /^!/);
        eval "($languages) = split(/[,\n]/)";

        print "$started - $ended: $title for $company\n\t$description\n\n";
}

The first line gets '$languages' setup to the 'variable' names. Each time through the while loop, we call the eval to translate/associate the columns to variable names.