in reply to Finding elements without a counter...

If I understand your question correctly, you want something that will only handle the items in @prettybase whose second column matches the patient number you pass in. Is that what you're looking for?

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

... strings and arrays will suffice. As they are easily available as native data types in any sane language, ... - blokhead, speaking on evolutionary algorithms

Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.

  • Comment on Re: Finding elements without a counter...

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Re: Re: Finding elements without a counter...
by bioinformatics (Friar) on Oct 13, 2003 at 18:30 UTC
    Yes, that is correct. Technically, I could have used pattern matching rather than a counter to go through @prettybase, but normally a counter works well for these type of programs. Unfortunately, not in this case.
    Bioinformatics
      my @prettybase; my $seen = 0; while (<PRETTYBASE>) { chomp; my @info = split /\t/; unless ($info[1] == $patient_number) { # Use this to short-cut out of the file once we've found our p +atient info. last if $seen; next; } $seen = 1; push @prettybase, $_; } # At this point, everything in @prettybase corresponds to the patient +specified. # Modify your algorithms accordingly.

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      We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

      The idea is a little like C++ templates, except not quite so brain-meltingly complicated. -- TheDamian, Exegesis 6

      ... strings and arrays will suffice. As they are easily available as native data types in any sane language, ... - blokhead, speaking on evolutionary algorithms

      Please remember that I'm crufty and crochety. All opinions are purely mine and all code is untested, unless otherwise specified.