Thanks a lot for this post. I went back and checked

Here is what the contents of the error file look like

**************************************
Errors for file: Merged_CSVfiles_1.txt
**************************************

Sample_identifier 11SS00342 / IRD Clinic  clinic_HIV000140180:
*  The following fields contain invalid values: Blah blah blah blah
*
Sample_identifier 11SS00336 / IRD Clinic  clinic_HIV000140174:
*  The following fields contain invalid values: Yada yada yada
*
Sample_identifier 11SS00303 / IRD Clinic  clinic_HIV000140141:
*  The following fields contain invalid values: yeah yeah yeah
[download]

Just to check that the array @sample_ids contains the actual ids I printed the contents of the sample id' and got the following

                    
    push(@sample_ids,$line);
        print(@sample_ids);
[download]

I get the following output which is the list of the ID's (this is just a truncated list, just 8 of the 438 errors) UCD11-02580-V UCD11-02581-P UCD11-02581-V UCD11-02583-P UCD11-02583-V UCD11-02584-P UCD11-02584-V UCD11-02585-P I also did the following as a check

                    
push(@sample_ids,$line);
                        
    }# End of the if loop
}#End of the for-each loop        

print $sample_ids[3];
[download]

and I got: 11SS00304

What I did realized though was that:

foreach my $records (@merged_array) {
    my @elements = split /,/, $records;

        print $elements[0];
[download]

The Output from this was: "John Doe"John Doe"John Doe"John Doe"John Doe

I realized that some of the fields themselves had commas within and that I couldn't consistently get the field I wanted by "print18" in this case

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