On Aug 10, Tim McGeary said: >follow-up question: will this only be true if $item of @array is >completely empty? This is the type of data for each $item of @array: > >ID, name_f, name_l, email, id, contact, group, member > >I am splitting this by commas into different $scalers to manipulate. >And I know that same of these fields are empty (to which I need to >report back to the people sending me the data). It will NEVER happen >that a whole line is empty, but just one or two of the fields in each line.
I don't see how this changes things, really. This is how I would do things: my @field_names = qw( ID name_f name_l email id contact group member ); my %long_names; @[EMAIL PROTECTED] = ( 'ID', 'First Name', 'Last Name', 'Email Address', 'id', 'Contact', 'Group', 'Member', ); while (<INPUT>) { chomp; my %record; @[EMAIL PROTECTED] = split /,/; if (my @empty = grep length $record{$_} == 0, @field_names) { empty_fields(@empty); } else { # process record } } Where the empty_fields() function would do something like: sub empty_fields { my $msg = "You left these fields empty: "; $msg .= join ", ", @[EMAIL PROTECTED]; # displays $msg to the user somehow } -- Jeff "japhy" Pinyan % How can we ever be the sold short or RPI Acacia Brother #734 % the cheated, we who for every service http://japhy.perlmonk.org/ % have long ago been overpaid? http://www.perlmonks.org/ % -- Meister Eckhart -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>