I agree that hashes are the best approach for merging keyed data. If there is some other reason to continue to use arrays, you can compare different approaches for an array lookup routine.

You will find these lines quite helpful when you put them at the top of your program:

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;
[download]

The diagnostics provide paragraph-long explanations of many common perl coding errors. For the type of mistakes that I make, the diagnostics are correct about 80% of the time. I think this is an amazingly good percentage.

As premchai21 said, you may need to update your version of perl to get this capability.

It should work perfectly the first time! - toma

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