Seek and Find

[hbrown.bios]

Hey guys, I'm still pretty new to perl, so I'm not even sure is this will work, but here is what I am trying to do. I have 2 files. say file A has a list of numbers (which I can put into an array because there aren't very many of them) and I want to search file B which has 7 columns. I want perl to print the matching line to a new file if column 2 matches a value in file a (or the array) AND matches a search phrase in column 7 and if the value in column 4 falls into a specified range. Any and all help would be greatly appreciated!

[Laurent_R]

Load the values of your first file into a hash rather than an array, lookup will be easier and performance much faster.

Then read the second file and check if the values can be found in the hash.

Provide some sample data if you need more help.

[hbrown.bios]

So here is an example of some of may data: GLU 66 PRO 436 9.116044197 Blank Asterisk GLU 67 ASN 427 9.34269896 Asterisk Asterisk What I would like it to do is if column 2 matches a number in the hash (or array), and the value in column 4 is within a given range of numbers, and column 7 matches a search phrase such as "Asterisk" it would print the entire matching line to a new file, and then for it to continue searching until the end of the document.

[kennethk]

Please see How do I post a question effectively?. In particular, note how the whitespace in your posted input has become mangled. This is because you did not include <code> tags. It's hard to help you code/debug if we see something different than what you see. Markup in the Monastery or Writeup Formatting Tips may be helpful.

For some sample code for list comparisons, which is close enough to be informative for your use case, see How can I tell whether a certain element is contained in a list or array? and/or How do I compute the difference of two arrays? How do I compute the intersection of two arrays? in perlfaq4.

You may also want to use a pre-rolled parsing solution, such as Text::CSV.

Have you actually written an code we can look at? Even if it doesn't work, it's very helpful in understanding how you are thinking.