Well, assuming you have fixed length data so that you know YES occurs at index 25 in the string given, I'll use my PSI::ESP module and guess that you've read in lines of data into an array (@arr), and that the YES string is supposed to occur at the end of that line and you haven't chomped the newline off the end of the line -- thus you are trying to compare "YES\n" eq "YES". If this guess sounds right, try doing a chomp $contact_me; prior to your inner conditional test as in:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @arr = <DATA>;
my $contact_me_count = 0;
for my $lcv (0 .. $#arr){
    if($arr[$lcv] =~ /^CONTACT_ME:/){
        my $contact_me = substr("$arr[$lcv]", 25);
        chomp $contact_me;
        if($contact_me eq 'YES'){
            $contact_me_count ++;
        }
    }
}
print $contact_me_count;
__DATA__
CONTACT_ME:              YES
CONTACT_ME:              NO
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When you're running into troubles like this, you should try to get some debugging info; for example, print out the value of $contact_me to make sure you're getting the part of the string you want (i.e. is that inner condition ever met?).

Assuming that part is working correctly, I think azatoth has a plausible suggestion about what might be wrong (that space).

This may not make much sense with the data you're working with, but let me make a suggestion: you appear to have the location of the "YES" hard-coded into $arr[$lcv], which is pretty inflexible. If you can, you might change that and use a regular expression solution (update e.g. $contact_me_count++ if ($arr[$lcv] =~/^CONTACT_ME:.*\bYES\b/); -- change the \b at the end to $ if the YES is at the end of the string)).

Here's a slightly more succinct way of doing it, given what you've written:

if ($arr[$lcv] =~/^CONTACT_ME"/ and substr ($arr[$lcv], 25) eq 'YES'))
+ {
    $contact_me_count++;
}
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Of course, perl allows you to say STATEMENT if EXPRESSION, if that floats your boat ( 3 lines into 1 ... who wouldn't like that?) =)

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor

My most humble apologies Folks and sincere gratitude for all your time and effort. I was away for a few days and was amazed to see the reponse for a first timer... I solved it by chomp $contact_me; Sorry.....

$contact_me_count++;
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FYI:It is perfectly legal to have a space between a variable and the ++ operator:

my $count_variable = 0;
$count_variable ++;
$count_variable
++;
print $count_variable; # prints: 2
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$s = 0;
print $s ++ for 1..9;
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Will not increment. Apparently, it depends on the context, whether the whitespace matters.

mkmcconn

update: danger, I'm sure you must be right about the prototyping of print().

My first reaction was also that the space is wrong, but then tye corrected me in the CB so I did a bit of experimenting and found surprising (to me) results. Guess what this snippet will do:

print $foo;
print $foo ++;
print $foo, $foo ++;
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--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

if($arr[$lcv] =~ /^CONTACT_ME:/){
      $contact_me = substr("$arr[$lcv]", 25);
}
elsif($contact_me eq 'YES'){
          $contact_me_count++;
      }
else {# define some default behaviour here}
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