Okay, everybody, it works! Here's the lowdown. It was a text-encoding problem. UTF-8 and UTF-16 weren't cooperating. Duh. also explains why just ONE character worked.... Seems like perl could deal with 0000000012345678 as an 8bit value, but a STRING of those (000000001234567800000000685708540000000064739567) was thought to be 00000000, 12345678, 00000000, 68570854, etc, which obviously DIDN'T match. I'm happy to have resovled this one. That's correct about the for/vs while. Oops! Thanks. And yes, I'm constantly reminded to consult CPAN. But, I'm just learning perl. I'm not using modules; I'm writing everything myself. The more code you write, the more you learn. I know it's reinventing the wheel. That's how you learn! "Good programmers write good programs, great programmers steal great programmers." Obviously. I'm trying to learn to be a good programmer before I become a great programmer. Thanks for your help everyone!

In reply to It works! by stalepretzel
in thread Input Record Separator WON'T WORK! by stalepretzel

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