I started with a form which has a standard action when in receipt of standard parameters. I added a checkbox to the form to change the action. What I opted to do was the following: 

if ($checkbox)  {
      #open file
      while (<FILE)> {
            #do something
       }
}

[download]
Of course when I tried it all sorts of error messages came up, but unfortunately none of them said "Oi, plonker, you can't put a 'while' statement inside an 'if'"! So I battled away until I finally understood that for myself.

What I did do was whack the action into a subroutine and put that into the 'if' statement.: 

if ($checkbox)  {
      &dosomething;
       }
}

sub dosomething {
 #open file
while (<FILE)> {
       #do something
}
}

[download]
My question is: are there other ways of making this work apart from a subroutine?

In reply to Using loops inside an 'if' statement by jonnyfolk

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