Firstly I is uber newbie @ perl. I'm attempting to write a script that rips out transaction information from a PGP encyrpted email.

Anyway it all works fin except that its handling the string $bob very strangely.

        print "$bob 123\n";

This is just a diagnostic line (as is the one before it). However it writes 123 over the contents of $bob. eg if $bob contained "Hello World", it would display "123lo World".

WTF.

Any help would be really appreciated. 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#use strict;

#while (</var/spool/imap/user/matt/VVSettlements/*.>) {
while (</tmp/42.>) {
        open(F, "cat $_ | pgp +batchmode +force +verbose=0 -f -z \"not
+ much\" 2>/dev/null |");

        while (<F>){
                if (/(BATCH .*)( 199. | 200. )/) {
                        $year = $2;
#                       print "\n\nSTART".$year."END\n\n";
                }
                if (/SALE .*/) {
                        unshift @a, $&;
                }
        }
        $bob = shift @a;
        print "$bob 123\n";           
        print $bob.$year while (defined($bob = shift @a));
}

[download]

In reply to String handling frustrations by troll314

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.