All of your problems are related to not understanding lexical scope, lexical variables, and the concepts of outter scopes being masked by inner scoped variables of the same name.

There's no need to declare 'my @list;' on line 7 (ie, outside the loop). This lexical variable is masked by the version of @list that exists within the sub, and that's the only time you use that variable anyway.

Your declaration on line 8 of @records gets masked by the new @records declaration within the while() loop. Then when the loop terminates, you get the original @records back, empty because it is not the same variable you were using within the while() loop.

You're pushing onto @list a reference to @list. And then returning @list. Yet inside your sub @list will never have more than one element. If that's really what you want, just return \@list. But that's probably not what you really want anyway. You probably want @list to not be passing in and out of scope every time you call your sub. But what's not what you need. You need to use lexical scoping correctly.

@records will never contain more than one element at the end of each iteration of your while() loop. And then it passes out of scope and disappears.

Any lexical declared within your while() loop will cease to exist at the end of each loop iteration. So there is nothing to print from @records. The @records being used inside the while() loop is a different variable from @records declared outside the while loop.

As mentioned in other posts, it's a bad habit to absorb values into a subroutine without passing them explicitly. That even applies to lexical filehandles.

Your biggest challenge seems to be in gaining an understanding of lexical scoping. perlsub is a good first step in understanding. But I'd actually recommend you pick up a copy of Learning Perl, from Randall Schwartz. Most of the problems you're having will disappear after you read through that book.

Thank you for your advice and help. I do have that book and I am slowly working through it. Thanks again.

1. The guard of the while reads a line, puts it in $_. This line is processed (by chomp and split).
2. A line is assigned to $nextline. Which is then unused.
3. Inside events, another line is read, assigned to another $nextline. This one remains unused as well.

Your code is pretty much impossible for me to decipher its purpose. You've posted questions here multiple times, and each time monks have attempted to figure out you're trying to do to little avail:

• exiting a for loop on 2011-03-23 22:37
• Parse variables on 2011-02-24 21:54
• redrafted code on 2011-02-01 19:59
• and others ...

I've read each of those, and nowhere do you try to explain your project in English.

Anytime someone is coding something, they should be able to explain it in words before they dive into coding. It would really help us if you were to explain what you're code is trying to accomplish. What is your data and how are you trying to process it?

Sorry about the confusion. I will definitely try and work that out in for myself. Thanks for the advice.

Hi Mate,

My advice is not that you go and just solve your own problem. It's that you try to explain to us what you're doing before showing us code. You've been working on this "project" for a while now so it's apparent that you're trying to accomplish something. However, given the number of consistent errors in your code even without knowing what it's doing, maybe it's time to start over?

Share a description of your project in english, and let us guide you toward the right way of accomplishing it.

open my $ih, '<', $fin or die "cannot open $fin for reading, $!"; 
$ih =~ s/\n+/\n/g;
[download]

$ih =~ s/\n+/\n/g or warn "No subst\n";
[download]