Hey Monks; first time poster, long time lurker (well for about the 4-5 months that I've been scripting in perl).

I have a file that has several thousand entries that are pre-sorted. I read the file into an array, pushing a new element for each entry in my file (the zeroth element being the top-most entry in my file). I want to take that top-most entry and compare it to the rest of the entries in the array, if they meet a certain criteria, I want to remove that entry from the array. Repeat until all entries have been consumed.

My previous attempts have involved an if condition (to remove entries that meet my criteria) nested within a foreach loop (to make the comparisons) nested within a while loop (to iterate through the array for entries that remain). It's a holy mess and I can't figure out way to do it that makes sense and doesn't skip over entries.

I've removed the print functions from the code to make it easier to read.

while (@entries){

    my $top_entry = shift @entries;
    my $counter = 0;
        
    foreach my $entry_to_compare (@entries){
        my $comparison = compare_sub ($top_entry, $entry_to_compare);
        if ($comparison <= $user_defined_value){        
            splice (@entries, $counter, 1);
        }
        else{
            $counter++;
        }
    }
}

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In reply to Iterating through an array using multiple loops and removing array elements by BiochemPhD

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