I just finished working on a similar problem. What I needed was to preinitialize an array so that later if a value was 0 it would report correctly, you can do the same basic thing ala

$max_size = 5;
@array    = (0) x $max_size; # put $max_size zeros in array

# process file here..
for ( $i = 0; $i <= $#array; $i++ ) {
# now set the value to lost if it is still zero
   $array[$i] = "$i.lost" unless ( $array[$i] );
}

[download]
Now this assumes that you will never have a 0 in a particular field, but if you can then you can use a different sentinal value

MMMMM... Chocolaty Perl Goodness.....

In reply to Re: Array: inserting what isn't there by l2kashe
in thread Array: inserting what isn't there by Anonymous Monk

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