I have one tsv file which which is exported from some cable testing software. I have to distinguish between the data that was already in the file and newly added data during that week, which i have done. I now have 2 tsv files, one that has old data in and one that has the newly added data.
I need to compare each line in the newfile to each in the oldfile and remove duplicates. It is the 2, 3 & 6 elements in each line that need to be compared as the others contain unique data.

e.g.
0 <t> 1 <t> 2 <t> 3 <t> 4 <t> 5 <t> 6
"12345" <t> "cdf34" <t> "l1" <t> "r1" <t> "notes" <t> "" <t> "l1:r1 l2:r2"

Once a dupe has been found the part no. (0) needs to be added to the notes field(4) its dupe of in the oldfile. if a dupe isnt found an 'A' needs to be added to the front of the part no (to make the line approved) and then that line is to be added to the bottom of the oldfile.
I have attempted this by extracting the data from the files into an array and spliting each line at the \t to make each line an array. Ive then used a for loop inside another accessing one line from the newfile and comparing its elements to the elements in every line in the oldfile, the problem is i cant seem edit the information in the files and the lines are printed several times as it loops through.
I hope someone can help me with this, im struggling a bit as ive only been learning perl for the last 2 wks.

thanks, steve.

In reply to Comparing files and and elements of arrays by sjd6

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