Athanasius, this was a great help! Thank you. In fact, I expect that file 2 will be quite large so this method should work better.

I have an additional question related to this code but I don't know whether it should be posted here or as a new post. I will chance asking here and remove it if there is a problem. I want to ensure that for Sample_2A, Sample_2B, Sample_2C in file_1 each of these columns will be compared to Sample_2 in file 2 i.e. that columns with matching numbers are compared but I am not sure of the best way to do this but in the code you suggested it might be difficult to do this since the fields are broken up line-by-line

In reply to Re^2: Can't access data stored in Hash - help! by corcra
in thread Can't access data stored in Hash - help! by corcra

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