Hello melissa_randel and welcome to the monastery and to the wonderful world of Perl

as a tip for your next posts i suggest to include some code you tried: you show more effort and the help can be better targeted at your level of wisdom: infact you had got good and very good replies to your question, but how many of them you understand completely?

Me too I dont understand the smart Anonymous's almost oneliner: i would need to refill it with a lot of print statements before understanding it.

Because of this i think the best approch is what the wise choroba presented you as first reply: think about your problem in words and then translate into Perl. I've started learning Perl with no programming nor scientific backgroud and after a decade of Perl i'm start thinking that the compiler is happier with plain basic code. Me too nowadays I tend to write 'smart' code but i think is often a matter of self exstimation more that a matter of quality.
So the code I present you will be easy and commented for a full understanding.

# always use stric and warnings (till the moment you know when is safe
+ disabling them)
use strict;
use warnings;
# we use an array to grab DATA. array preserves order, if order in the
+ output is needed
my @arr;

# <> is something like an iterator:
# $next_line = <DATA> retrieve next line
# for <DATA> process all lines
# we chomp all lines to remove \n at the end and then we push the @arr
+ with the line
chomp $_ and push @arr,$_ for <DATA>;

# hashes provides uniqueness of keys, and we need uniqueness because..
+.
my %adj;

# .. in the loop from 0 to the last index of @arr
# (pay attention when using $#arr: @arr in scalar context return num o
+f elements,
# while $#arr is the last index of the array starting from 0
# so scalar @arr == $#arr + 1)
# in the loop we process two value at time (sliding window?) checking 
+if the
# numerical part is adjacent to the next element's numerical part
for (0..$#arr){
    # exit condition go EVERYTIME at the beginning of loops
    # so we will exit the loop if is the last element (yet processed p
+reviously)
    last if $_ == $#arr;
    
    # grab the numerical part of interest
    # $1 is what inside the first matched () group. (capturing parenth
+eses)
    my $cur_num = $1 if $arr[$_] =~/\d*[A-Z]_(\d+)$/;
    my $next_num = $1 if $arr[$_ + 1] =~/\d*[A-Z]_(\d+)$/;
    
    # if current is adjacent to next
    if ($cur_num == $next_num - 1){
                # we populate the hash with nevermind values
                $adj{$arr[$_]} = undef;
                $adj{$arr[$_ + 1]} = undef;
                
                # if we had used $adj{$arr[$_]}++ (autoincrement)
                # you would notice the X_203 with value of 2
                # because is inserted twice: as next_num while process
+ing X_202
                # and as current_num while X_204
    }
}

# if the order of the data must be preserved we still have the array:
# if the data was alphabetically ordered would be simpler (and the arr
+ay unuseful)
# simple as print "$_\n" for sor keys %adj
foreach (@arr){
  print "$_\n" if exists $adj{ $_ };
}
__DATA__
2L_33
2L_34
3L_45
3L_87
X_202
X_203
X_204
[download]

Obviously concise code is a good thing. But someone here at PerlMonks once said:Dont code at your best. Being to debug twice difficult then write code, you'll not be able to debug, by definition
so in the above code:

    my $cur_num = $1 if $arr[$_] =~/\d*[A-Z]_(\d+)$/;
    my $next_num = $1 if $arr[$_ + 1] =~/\d*[A-Z]_(\d+)$/;
[download]

can be shortned (imagine a long list to process) into

    my ($cur_num,$next_num) = map {$1 if $_  =~/\d*[A-Z]_(\d+)$/} $arr
+[$_],$arr[$_+1];
[download]

But i suspect is not faster nor more efficient: is just more concise and uneasier to debug: the plain, kid version is the easiest to debug (because you'll get the exact line number of the statement producing the error!):

   if (  $arr[$_] =~/\d*[A-Z]_(\d+)$/  ){
       $cur_num = $1;
   }
[download]

HtH
L*

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