It may have nothing to do with scoping at all. Basic rule is that a my variable is visible to everything in the block in which it's declared, so as long as your "if" is within the while loop, $date will be visible. I'd point a finger (tentatively) at 

/(\w{3}\s+\w{3}\s+\d{1,2}/;
my $date = $1;

[download]

For two reasons: one is that it's not well-formed. You should be getting an error on that (There's no closing paren). So if this is cut-n-paste, that's a problem right there. Second problem is that (assuming there is a closing paren in the actual code) if that regex doesn't match, $1 won't be set, and it's no surprise that you get nothing when you print out the value of $date.

You *are* running with -w and strict on, aren't you? The present case is a VERY good example of why you should; if $date doesn't get set and you try to print it, -w will tell you it's uninitialized. And if $date has gone out of scope, strict will complain about it not being declared. So: use -w and strict : really.

The fix, assuming you want to ignore lines that don't match your date-finding pattern: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

# stuff

# (in while loop)
while (<my_file>) {
    next unless my ($date) =~ /(\w{3}\s+\w{3}\s+\d{1,2})/;
    # stuff
    if ($foo) {
        print "Date is $date\n";
    }
    # more stuff
}

[download]

HTH!

In reply to Re: Scoping Variables by arturo
in thread Scoping Variables by stuffy

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