I find the spec unclear.

What do you mean by matches? Do you mean a field in line 1 of file 1 happened to be the same as a field in line 2 of file 2? Does it matter if the match is between field 1 and field 5, or do the fields in question have to match up?

Without being able to state a clear spec, it is hard to meet it.

Anyways, some tips.

  1. However you solve the problem, it will probably help to have nested data structures. And for that it will help to read through References quick reference.
  2. To see if an actual data structure looks like you wanted it to look like, you can try Data::Dumper.
  3. Any problems of the form "This matches something in that list" are usually best handled in Perl by taking that list, and turning it into a hash, then doing a hash lookup.
  4. Take things one step at a time. If the full problem is too much for you, just find a piece you can handle. For instance figure out what internal data structure you want to use, and then inline some sample data in your script and try to work with that. Once you can get an answer from the parsed data, then worry about building a piece that reads the file into that structure...

In reply to Re (tilly) 1: Comparing fields in 1 database with fields in another by tilly
in thread Comparing fields in 1 database with fields in another by rline

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