Basically, I am comparing each character across a number of same-length strings
You might get a better answer if you explained how this character comparison works (compare each character to what)?

In Perl often a regex (regular expression) is what you need for this sort of situation. Also it is seldom necessary to use numeric indicies (or course, seldom does not mean "never"). Perl has a lot of cool iterators to process arrays and other structures of things without using an explicit index. That is actually very cool since right at the top of common coding errors is the "off by one" problem.

Anyway you dived pretty quick into asking how to access a string of characters as an array and it might be that what you really need to know is actually something else.

In reply to Re: Interpolate variable name in Perl? by Marshall
in thread Interpolate variable name in Perl? by SuzuBell

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.