Just fyi... I wrote a bit of code to take care of those values that do not have 2 decimal places:

#my humble code snippet is:

# for 4th column check number of decimals
   my @dec = split("\\.", $cols[3]);
   my $dec_length = length($dec[1]);
   if ($dec_length != 2) {
       print "BAD decimal length - $x1\n";
   }

[download]

After putting some more thought on this, I think I found the way to do this. What I do is just take the average of the temperature column, and then assign some kind of cutoff value (e.g.: temp_average - 5). Then, if the temp value falls below the cutoff value (which will always do if there is a character missing), then this line will be flagged.

So far it seems to work well

HOWEVER... here's the real head scratcher: how would you deal with two columns that have dates and time?

For instance, assume that you have dates & times like these, which when transmitted wirelessly, you get potential dropouts:

A3 11/20/2013 8:19:56 26.62 26.69
A4 11/20/2013 8:19:57 26.62 26.69
A5 11/20/2013 8:19:58 26.62 26.69
A7 11/20/2013 8:20:1 26.62 26.69
A9 11/20/2013 8:20:4 26.62 26.69
A10 11/20/2013 8:20:5 26.62 26.69
A12 11/20/2013 8:20:8 26.62 26.69
A13 11/20/2013 8:20:9 26.69 26.69
A14 11/20/2013 8:20:10 26.62 26.69
A16 11/20/2013 8:20:13 26.62 26.69
A18 11/20/2013 8:20:16 26.62 26.69
A23 11/20/2013 8:20:22 26.62 26.69


But, if you add "interference" that "looses" a character for the dates
+ & time fields, you would get:

A3 11/20/2013 8:19:56 26.62 26.69
A4 1/20/2013 8:19:57 26.62 26.69
A5 11/0/2013 8:19:58 26.62 26.69
A7 11/20/2013 8:20:1 26.62 26.69
A9 11/2/2013 8:20:4 26.62 26.69
A10 11/20/2013 8:20:5 26.62 26.69
A12 11/20/2013 8:20:8 26.62 26.69
A13 11/20/2013 8:0:9 26.69 26.69
A14 11/20/2013 8:20:10 26.62 26.69
A16 1/20/2013 8:2:13 26.62 26.69
A18 11/20/2013 8:0:16 26.62 26.69
A23 11/20/2013 8:20:22 26.62 26.69

Based on this example, what would you suggest I could do to "flag" the
+ bad dates & times?

[download]

In reply to Re^4: comparing numbers from previous lines in a file? by coding1227
in thread comparing numbers from previous lines in a file? by coding1227

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