Dear Monks,

There are times when I love Perl, but there are times when I hate it. I love the easy questions but once things get a little complex, I get completely lost.

I think most of my hate stems from the fact that I'm not a programmer by trade and approach things incorrectly in the Perl and programming worlds - I've tried everything it seems (psuedocode, Llama, Camel, Cookbook, Perldocs, Perl Monks) and I still get stuck @ the stupidest places. Case in point this problem I'm currently having.

I have three sets of data that are comprised of IDs that overlap. I have another set of data that contains a bunch of fields including the ID from the original sets of data. How can I sort the data using IF/ELSIF statements into different OUTPUT files? Should I be using hashes and not arrays for the original data sets? Why do I suck so bad? Any other tips for someone still struggling with Perl after years of tinkering?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @a = qw(
        60622
        60516
        60201
    );

my @b = qw(
        90210
        60622
        12345
    );

my @c = qw(
        11412
        32134
        60201
    );

open OUTPUT_A, ">a.txt" or die "Can't open OUTPUT_A: $!\n";
open OUTPUT_B, ">b.txt" or die "Can't open OUTPUT_B: $!\n";
open OUTPUT_C, ">c.txt" or die "Can't open OUTPUT_C: $!\n";

while (<DATA>) {
   chomp;
   my($fn, $ln, $id) = split(",", $_);
   # print $fn, $ln and $id to OUTPUT_A if $id = @a[0,1,2...n]
   # elsif print $fn, $ln and $id to OUTPUT_B if $id = @b[0,1,2...n]
   # elsif print $fn, $ln and $id to OUTPUT_C if $id = @c[0,1,2...n]  
+ 
}

close OUTPUT_A; 
close OUTPUT_B; 
close OUTPUT_C;

__END__
Homer,Simpson,60622
Clark,Kent,90210
Fred,Flintstone,00987
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