in reply to Is My Split Or My Pattern Bad?

The code you provided works fine (as shown below). What input are you feeding it?

By the way, "anal" is a very poor choice of abbrieviation for "analysis".

%analysis = ( a_key => 'moop:Did you know that Office Image Running?:foobar!', ); foreach $key (keys %analysis) { @msg = (); $val = $analysis{$key}; @msg = split /:/, $val; $anal_host_flg = 0, $anal_data_flg = 0, $anal_entries = 0; $anal_class_flg = 0, $anal_image_flg = 0, $anal_channel_flg = 0; foreach $message (@msg) { # print "$message\n"; $anal_entries = $#msg + 1; if ($anal_entries == 0) { print "Program Error 3 - $key $val\n"; } if ($message =~ /SECTION IS NOT IN EADAS CLASS/) { $anal_class_flg = $anal_class_flg + 1; print("class\n"); } elsif ($message =~ /Office Image Running/) { $anal_image_flg = $anal_image_flg + 1; print("image\n"); } elsif ($message =~ /Office Channel Not Logged In/) { $anal_channel_flg = $anal_channel_flg + 1; print("channel\n"); } elsif ($message =~ /Telephath Unable To Connect to Office/) { $anal_host_flg = $anal_host_flg + 1; print("host\n"); } elsif ($message =~ /No New Data Was Collected/) { $anal_data_flg = $anal_data_flg + 1; print("data\n"); } else { # print "Program Error 4 - $key $val\n"; print "Program Error 4 - $message\n"; } } } __END__ output ====== Program Error 4 - moop image Program Error 4 - foobar!