You don't quite have for (...) { while (<DATA>) { } }, but you do suffer from the same problem (in addition to the one samarzone mentioned). If the first pass of the loop reads DATA until its end of file, what do you think the next pass of the loop will read?

You should be loading the contents of DATA into a memory structure, and extracting the data you need from the data structure for each triple. 

use strict;
use warnings;

my %data;
{
   my $chrom;
   while (<DATA>) {
      chomp;
      if (/^variableStep chrom=(\S+)/) {
         $chrom = $1;
      } else {
         my ($tag, $value) = split;
         push @{ $data{$chrom} }, [ $tag, $value ];
      }
   }
}

for (
   [qw( chr1  9837  9840 )],
   [qw( chr1 99998 99999 )],
   [qw( chr2  9838  9840 )],
) {
   my ($chrom, $start, $stop) = @$_;

   my $chrom_d = $data{$chrom};

   my $count;
   my $sum;
   for (@$chrom_d) {
      my ($tag, $value) = @$_;
      next if $tag < $start || $tag > $stop;
      ++$count;
      $sum += $value;
   }

   if ($count) {
      my $avg = $sum/$count;
      print("$chrom $start..$stop average: $avg\n");
   } else {
      print("$chrom $start..$stop average: NA\n");
   }
}

__DATA__
variableStep chrom=chr1
9837    0.010
9838    0.008
9839    0.007
9840    0.004
9841    0.002
9842    0.001
variableStep chrom=chr2
9837    0.090
9838    0.038
9839    0.017
9840    0.044
9841    0.052
9842    0.091

[download]
chr1 9837..9840 average: 0.00725
chr1 99998..99999 average: NA
chr2 9838..9840 average: 0.033

[download]

In reply to Re: filtering data and while loop problem by ikegami
in thread filtering data and while loop problem by coldy

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.