Hi there
I have a text file that looks like the following 
0 48.23 17.90
48.23 0 49.58
17.90 49.58 0
59.62 52.04 65.80
62.20 56.02 68.82
35.37 37.87 36.52
27.33 50.73 31.85

[download]
etc ...
What I would like to do is take these values and calculate the average. The calculation is obviously trivial but I'm struggling somewhat with extracting the values due to the format (take into account that the actual files I am working on have many more than three columns per row and that these files all have a different number of columns (so one file may have 50 columns per row, another 35 columns per row and so on).
This is what I have come up with so far 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
my @line;

# shall we get the file then?

my $inputfile = $ARGV[0];

# guess we need to open it too

open(INPUT, "$inputfile") 
    || die "Error: Can't open $inputfile for reading: $!\n";

# lets place contents of file into array

my @filecontents = <INPUT>;

# we now want a for loop to access the array

for(my $i = 0; $i < @filecontents; $i++)
{

    # place each line in file
    # into another array
    
    @line = split(/\,/, $filecontents[$i]);
    
}

[download]
My problem is I'm not quite sure how to go from here in order to extract one value at a time from each row so I can add all values together when calculating my average.
Any help/suggestions much appreciated.

In reply to extracting and using values from a matrix file by Angharad

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