Dave, thank you you are being very helpful, I am sorry I am quite new to perl and I don't understand it that well yet. Now when i do what you wrote: 

my @five_only = @A[0..4];
print @five_only

[download]

I still get a list of about 300 numbers and letters does this mean I have to split since i need to make the string into independent items? I already tried that but it would not work this way unfortunately 

my @values = split(',', @A);

  foreach my $val (@values) {
    d = d + 1);
     }

[download]

That would also be able to count however it seems that does not work, I tried the following just to get a new list of items that does function properly because when i requested te first five items i got a hundred numbers but that neither works since i got this response

<code> my @values = split(',', @A); foreach my $val (@values) { push (@vals, '$vals'); } <code/>

HASH(0x100804ed0)$vals

thanks to all you guys for your help, I am unfortunately quite slow in understanding and I have been wanting to write this program a particular time now, that is why i might appear quite impatient, my apologies for that

I am going to read the perlintro and the join split and others tomorrow

In reply to Re^7: Perl list items by robertw
in thread Perl list items by robertw

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