Hi and thanks FunkyMonk for the reply.. i do get a little lost tho here as regards where i am opening my file and feeding it into @data , can you expound on that for me please? (sorry for being the noob)

fwiw, based on your well explained pattern matching sequences above, i have also created a possible revised unless statement 

open(DATAFILE, "$input") || die("Can't open $input:!\n");

while (<DATAFILE>) {
     unless (m{^(\d\.d{5})\s,(\d\d:\d\d:\d\d)\s*}) 
    {  next; }
    
    chomp $_;
         
    ($quote,$time) = split(",", $_);
    chop($quote); #remove a white space
    ($hour,$minute,$second) = split(":",$time);) 
    # more processing

[download]
How does that look? although i do like the way you have done things.. because of an internet outage here the last 4 hours , i was unable to do any testing of new code and had to bring up my old buggy code live @ 5pm E.S.T .. id really like to able to just drop in a new unless statement into the existing code , if thats at all possible?

The script eventually updates a mysql database and and creates webpage.. so its not straightforward testing the code out of a live situation so i want to keep revisions to a minimum.

p.s i realise that i may be dismissing some of the conventions of working with floating point numbers which may be a little unsettling to some, but for this project i am sure that the 'shortcuts' i am taking are safe. I have my code working fine in a live environment for 2 weeks now. The only issue i have is this bug when dealing with unexpected input data formats in my input files.

p.p.s sorry for being so verbose here.

conal.

In reply to Re^2: handling erronous input by Conal
in thread handling erronous input by Conal

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