Thanks for the help guys! That made a lot of sense I am slowly learning syntax for perl. So now my question has evolved to.. I want to compare array hash strings. Specifically I want to do something like this, where i am comparing the $hash{alerts}[0]{status_history}{status} string to a string of them. (The english translation is, I want to compare that status_history,status strings of 1's. If there are at least 6 ones in the front of the arry, do stuff)

if ($hash{alerts}[0]{status_history}{status}  =~ /1,1,1,1,1,1/)
{
do cool stuff
}
[download]

Is that correct>?