Thanks for the attention and suggestion 2teez

I realize it would be more concise the declare the variables as they come into use (and I prefer the look of it that way myself) but I work in a professional environment (which is why I'm not at liberty to share the entirety of my code with the world wide web) with coding guidelines and conventions. It is convention to declare all variables at the outset to better document the routine.

$proj and $pointerProj are string variables defined elsewhere and used in the naming convention of the data files.