"Is there any hope for me?" Probably.

What do you mean by "grep the array index"? Do you mean "search the array for the index of an array element containing a specific entry?"

I'm guessing you're doing something like this to read the array:

open(my $fh, "<", $stripped_file) or die "Could not open $stripped_fil
+e because $!\n";

my @text = <$fh>;
close($fh);
[download]

and aren't getting what you expect. I'd use Data::Dumper to see if what you've read is what you think you've read.

It would be helpful to show us some code and a sample of the stripped file.