I have 2 arrays; one contains a list of say light switches, the other contains lines of comma separated values. The lines of comma separated values have $unixtime,$switchname,$state. For our purposes here there are multiple possible states of off and one possible state of on. I want to do something like

foreach (@switches) { find total time switch was off }

I am thinking I want to pattern match down to only one switch (the array is in order based on the unixtime column) then go through one at a time and find a line that doesn't match the /on/ pattern, then continue till I find a line that matches the /on/ pattern. Then substract column one of the on entry from column one from the off entry and add it to a total off time variable. The only other thing is that a switch can be turned on and off multiple times in our window. I am kind of new to perl and it is my first language so any help you can provide with the { find total time switch was off } part would really be appreciated. I know this has to be out there somewhere but I couldn't figure out what to search for so I decided to ask for help instead.

In reply to performing operation on multiple items in an array by vatheck

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