in reply to Why is the following instance of Matching using an array element not working

It looks like your iterating over lines from Errors-email.txt (and it would have helped to see some of these lines, since they contain the IDs):

...
open (ERRORFILE,"<", "Errors-email.txt") || die "File not found\n";  
        @error_array = <ERRORFILE>;
...
foreach my $line(@error_array){
#
# Some $line substitutions here...
...
push(@sample_ids,$line);
...

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Then you have the following:

...
foreach my $records(@merged_array){
    
    if($records =~ /$sample_ids[3]/){
...

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Where @merged_array contains lines from your cvs file.

Does @sample_ids contain only the IDs? Did you try printing $sample_ids[3] to see what you get? Since you successfully used UCD67832 in the regex, it's evident that $sample_ids[3] does not equal UCD67832. What does it equal? Is UCD67832 a different element of @sample_ids? Does @sample_ids comtain whole lines instead of IDs?

I can't see that you've actually isolated the ID (unless it's via the set of substitutions), so I'd tend to focus on grabbing the ID from $line around those substitutions, and then push(@sample_ids,$id);

Hope this helps!

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Re^2: Why is the following instance of Matching using an array element not working
by MyJeweledPerls (Initiate) on Aug 10, 2012 at 19:33 UTC

    Thanks a lot for this post. I went back and checked

    Here is what the contents of the error file look like 
    **************************************
Errors for file: Merged_CSVfiles_1.txt
**************************************

Sample_identifier 11SS00342 / IRD Clinic  clinic_HIV000140180:
*  The following fields contain invalid values: Blah blah blah blah
*
Sample_identifier 11SS00336 / IRD Clinic  clinic_HIV000140174:
*  The following fields contain invalid values: Yada yada yada
*
Sample_identifier 11SS00303 / IRD Clinic  clinic_HIV000140141:
*  The following fields contain invalid values: yeah yeah yeah

    [download]
    Just to check that the array @sample_ids contains the actual ids I printed the contents of the sample id' and got the following 
                        
    push(@sample_ids,$line);
        print(@sample_ids);

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    I get the following output which is the list of the ID's (this is just a truncated list, just 8 of the 438 errors) UCD11-02580-V UCD11-02581-P UCD11-02581-V UCD11-02583-P UCD11-02583-V UCD11-02584-P UCD11-02584-V UCD11-02585-P I also did the following as a check 
                        
push(@sample_ids,$line);
                        
    }# End of the if loop
}#End of the for-each loop        

print $sample_ids[3];

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    and I got: 11SS00304

    What I did realized though was that: 
    foreach my $records (@merged_array) {
    my @elements = split /,/, $records;

        print $elements[0];

    [download]

    The Output from this was: "John Doe"John Doe"John Doe"John Doe"John Doe

    I realized that some of the fields themselves had commas within and that I couldn't consistently get the field I wanted by "print18" in this case

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]

      You're most welcome, MyJeweledPerls!

      If getting the field you want from the cvs lines is still presenting a problem, consider using Text::CSV to open and parse your cvs file. Its documentation shows how to do this, so you can get that field.

[reply]

        I have worked with Text::CSV in the past. I have only slight issue with it, which I am not sure if I am not getting how to use it correctly. Here is the following code: 

        my $csv = Text::CSV->new();

open (CSV,"<", "Merged_CSVfiles.csv") || die "File not found\n"; 

    while (<CSV>) {            # While Loop Open Bracket

        next if ($. == 1);
        
        if ($csv->parse($_)) {        #If Open Bracket
        
            my @columns = $csv->fields();
                
                #__ Assigning $columns[0]-$columns[26] to variables
                

                    
                    my @Sample_Ids_m = $columns[16];
                    print ($Sample_Ids_m[0]);        
                    
    
        } else {                    # If Closed Bracket
                                            # Else Open Bracket
        
            my $err = $csv-> error_input; 
            print "Failed to parse line: $err";
            
            close CSV;

        } # Closed Else Bracket
    }#Closed While Loop Bracket

        [download]

        All the ID are loaded into the first element of the array @Sample_Ids_m. This would be a problem but arrays can be different lengths and there are no rules current for constructing Sample ID numbers. It is a random sort of thing.

        If there was some uniformity I could use the substr function and a for loop and extract our individual id's but I dont seem to be able too. I will play around with it for a bit more

[reply]
[d/l]

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