Please can someone help me flush out some bugs in my script. I have an input file which can look like this.. 

//input.txt

1.57163 ,17:29:57 Simple Dealin 
1.57163 ,17:29:57 
1.57163 ,17:29:57 
1.57163 ,17:29:57 
1.57163 ,17:29:57 
1.57163 ,17:29:57 
1.57163 ,17:29:57 
1.571 ,17: 
1.57172 ,17:30:08 
1.57176 ,17:30:10

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I only want to use data like '1.57172 ,17:30:08 ' for my computation, e.g.. i want to disregard data that looks like ' 1.571 ,17: ' I would also like to use ' 1.57163 ,17:29:57 Simple Dealin ', if my code was capable of ignoring the data after the time.

The code i have come up with isnt good enough, which is below.. 


while (<DATAFILE>) {
      unless (m{^(.*?)\s*,([\d:]+)}) 
    {
       next;
    }
    
    chomp $_;
         
    ($quote,$time) = split(",", $_);
    // do my computations
    chop($quote);chop($quote);

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What i need is for my code to only accept input of 1 digit before the decimal place and 5 after , a space, a comma.. then an 8 character time using : as a seperator that will ignore any data on the same line after the seconds.

can anyone help me flush out this bug in my script please?

conal.

In reply to handling erronous input by Conal

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