in reply to Substitute script for a newbie

Escape the backslash: 
    $line =~ s/A.TL5F00/+TL\\F5C/g;

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Tip #1 from the Basic debugging checklist: diagnostics might give you a little more info (it didn't for me on Perl version 5.12, but it did for 5.14).

Did you really want the print inside the while loop? while ( $line = <FILE> ) { is really the same as while (defined($line = <FILE>)) {. So, outside the while, $line is undefined.

UPDATE: You can simplify the if/else code with this single substitution: 

use warnings;
use strict;

while (my $line = <DATA>) {
    $line =~ s/^A.TL5([EF])00/+TL\\${1}5C/g;
    print $line;
}

__DATA__
A.TL5E001100.TAV
A.TL5F001100.TAV

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Re^2: Substitute script for a newbie
by jspanos (Initiate) on Jul 14, 2015 at 17:14 UTC

    Thank you. One thing I should have mentioned is that I need to replace several different stock option symbols. That is why I have the elsif statement. There will be more.

    I also think that I am making this a lot more complex than it needs to be so I looked at an old script from a Perl lesson and I am going to use that. I will keep you posted.

[reply]
      I would suppose that you have somewhere a file with a correspondence between old names and new names. If so, please provide a sample of that file so that we can figure out how to use it.

      The idea would be then to read this file and to load the information into a hash (old name = key, new name = value). Then you read your other file (the one you want to process), read the input, lookup into the hash and write the new name (to a new file).

      I can't give you much more details at this point. We would need to see a sample of the file with the translation (old to new name) as well as a sample of your input file.

[reply]

        The file I have is only the old symbols and it is a list of 590; like below (minus the spaces)

        A.TL5E001100.TAV

        A.TL5F001560.TAV

        A.TL5T001240.TAV

        A.TL5E001230.TAV

        A.TL5E001270.TAV

        So A.TL5E001100.TAV needs to change to +TL\E5C1100.TAV, A.TL5F001560.TAV needs to change to +TL\F5C1560.TAV, etc

        I rewrote the code to be a lot simpler and only did one substitution just so I could see what the output is. Now it runs, but I get no output so I need to read up on matching and substitution string syntax. 

        use strict;
use warnings;

my $input = 'TAV.stock.opt.oldsym.txt';

{

  unless(open(INPUT,$input))                           
  {                                                    
      die "\nCannot open $input\n";  
  }

    <INPUT>;
    
    my @lines;
    
    while(my $line = <INPUT>)
    {
    
      chomp $line;
     
     if ($line =~ m/^A.TL5E00/)
     
     {
     
     $line =~ s/A.TL5E00/'+TL\E5C'/g;    
     
     }
     
    }     
    
    close INPUT;
    
    foreach my $line(@lines)
    {
       print $line,"\n";
    }    
    
}

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