Re (tilly) 1: OK... I am confused and lost :( Editing FlatFile

[tilly]

If you find yourself writing long strings of named variables, particularly if you have to synchronize them between different pieces of code you should use hashes and hash slices.

For instance suppose that somewhere you have:

@fields = qw(
  viewpositionid institution department confirstname
  conlastname conemail conphone titleposition posnumbert
  typeposition programtype dvmonth dvday dvyear edmonth
  edday edyear numposition numvacunit totsalary
  budgetsalary statefundsources fedfundsources
  statebudgetcat priclass subip thetime approved
);

Then your loop could be replaced with:

foreach my $rec (@ODB) {
  chomp($rec);
  my %db_rec;
  @db_rec{@fields} = split /\t/, $rec;
  if ($db_rec{viewpositionid} == $cur_rec{viewpositionid}) {
    # Replace the existing with the updated.
    %db_rec = %cur_rec;
    $cur_rec{sub_ip} = $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR};
    $cur_rec{approved} = "No";
  }
  print DATABASE join "\t", @db_rc{@fields};
  print DATABASE "\n";
}

which is much clearer, and less error prone. (I would choose easier names to read and also try to lose the flatfile database, but one step at a time...)

The key points here are that people tend to mess up positional logic (computers don't) and you want to try to reduce the number of places that any given item of information (eg what fields appear in what order). Plus losing a ton of globals is generally a Good Thing...

Updated Steve_p - fixed the opening code tag on the second block of code