in reply to Help in using arrays

It seems to me like you're over-thinking your algorithm. What you want to express in code is "for each line of data, if the value in the second column is contained in my pre-existing dataset (@all), print the line". Perl is very expressive, so it allows you to say that almost directly:

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; @all = ("7723","7725","9908","7765","7874"); while( <DATA> ) { my @column = split /\s+/; #get columns out of data line for my $x (@all) { next unless $x == $column[1]; # compare second column, move on i +f no match print $_; # we found a match, print out the original line last; # we're done, so stop comparing this line } } __DATA__ 77876 8543 CA84985 54E 77873 8003 CA84985 54E 77875 7725 CA84985 54E 77872 8511 CA84985 54E 77873 8123 CA84985 54E 77822 9908 CA84985 54E 77819 8503 CA84985 54E 77826 8040 CA84985 54E 77822 7874 CA84985 54E 77884 8543 CA84985 54E 77809 7211 CA84985 54E

However, a knowledge of design patterns yields a more elegant solution suggested by the Schwartzian Transform.

#!/usr/bin/env perl use strict; use warnings; @all = ("7723","7725","9908","7765","7874"); # partial application of the Schwartzian Transform # each unique value in @all will now be a key in the %all hash my %all = map { $_ => 1 } @all; while( <DATA> ) { my @column = split /\s+/; #get columns out of data line print $_ if $all{$column[1]}; } __DATA__ 77876 8543 CA84985 54E 77873 8003 CA84985 54E 77875 7725 CA84985 54E 77872 8511 CA84985 54E 77873 8123 CA84985 54E 77822 9908 CA84985 54E 77819 8503 CA84985 54E 77826 8040 CA84985 54E 77822 7874 CA84985 54E 77884 8543 CA84985 54E 77809 7211 CA84985 54E

The transformation of array to hash allows the check to be very simple: "does our dataset contain this value?".

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