note moritz <p>My guess is that a few of the input rows are simply not of the same syntax as the others (or some values are missing). <p>From your quite long post I didn't quite understand which value is undefined, but if you have identified it, do something like <code> use Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Useqq = 1; # and then in the loop: unless (defined $value_that_is_sometimes_undefined) { print STDERR Dumper($whole_line); } </code> <p>to see if the input line is still what you thought it was. <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed] </div></div> 1020745 1020745