Also, your current program will give you a false positive if a line is duplicated in either of the two files.

You need to specify more precisely just what you mean by "match." Do you mean that a line of one file is a substring of a line in the other file? If f1.txt has a line with just the four letters "bell", should that match a line in f2.txt that has the phrase "the antebellum south"?

Once you specify what you want, we can be more help.

The main purpose is to compare two files and match the contents of one file in order to get the line number of that match!

One of the files has code comments! And the other has the source code from where the comments where extracted!

Example:
File1.txt


public class Finger { //Commment 1
public static void main(String[] arguments) {//com 2
        String user; 
        String host;
//comm3
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File2.txt


//Comment 1
//com 2
//comm3
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Result


Line 1: //Comment 1
Line 2: //Com 2
Line 5: //comm3
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Thank you all for your help!!

If you have grep on your system, this would work:

grep -F -n -f File2.txt File1.txt
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--
Barbie | Birmingham Perl Mongers | http://birmingham.pm.org/

I hate to point someone away from perl, but this is pretty much the problem domain that fgrep was designed for. Try man fgrep at the command line.

Basically you pass fgrep a file containing text to match (ie, the comments) and then have it search the other file(s) (ie, the code).

It looks like you'll want to do something like
grep -nf comments.txt sourcecode.c

Assuming your first file is in a consistant format, you can trim off everything not in between quotes before saving to the hash. You could do your first while loop like this:

while (<F1>){
    s/\A
        [^"]*   # Read until we get to a quote char
        "       # The actual quote char
        ([^"]*) # Read (and save) until we hit another quote char
    /$1/x;
    $HASH{$_}++;
}
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This will fail for embedded double-quotes, but most programs fail when that happens, anyway, so I wouldn't worry about it.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

I! suggest! you! use! the! diff! function! instead! of! reinventing! the! wheel!

Or diff even ;)

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).

** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

open (F1,"f1.txt");
open (F2,"f2.txt");

while (<F1>){
    $HASH_a{$_}++; ### two hashes
}
close(F1);

while (<F2>){
    $HASH_b{$_}++;
### two hashes used to compare unique sets
}

foreach $line (sort keys %HASH_a){
    print "$line" if ( exists $HASH_b{$line} );
### switched this to check for existence of a key
### in one hash which we know exists in the other.
### also removed the \n in the print, because we
### never chomp()ed them off the originals.
}
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