Unfortunately I am unable to upgrade to Perl 5.10 at the moment so need to find a solution for Perl 5.8.8
I'm confused as to why the code produces the concatenation error as you've discovered.
The question is how do I get it to print both sides of the mismatch and I admit I hadn't catered for undef elements. Can you advise me on how to cater for both of those issues using the code posted ?