On May 10, Tucker, Ernie said: >Here is my first problem to the list. I have two different files with >information that I need to find out what both have.
This is answered in the Perl FAQ: japhy% perldoc -q intersection Found in /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.00502/pod/perlfaq4.pod "How do I compute the difference of two arrays? How do I compute the intersection of two arrays?" Use a hash. Here's code to do both and more. It assumes that each element is unique in a given array: @union = @intersection = @difference = (); %count = (); foreach $element (@array1, @array2) { $count{$element}++ } foreach $element (keys %count) { push @union, $element; push @{ $count{$element} > 1 ? \@intersection : \@difference }, $element; } This assumes you have two arrays, which you don't, technically. However, you can make the following adjustments: open FILE_1, "< this" or die "can't read this: $!"; $seen{$_}++ while <FILE_1>; close FILE_1; open FILE_2, "< that" or die "can't read that: $!"; while (<FILE_2>) { print if $seen{$_}; } close FILE_2; This is better than plopping the content of the files into arrays and using the code from the FAQ. -- Jeff "japhy" Pinyan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.pobox.com/~japhy/ RPI Acacia brother #734 http://www.perlmonks.org/ http://www.cpan.org/ ** Look for "Regular Expressions in Perl" published by Manning, in 2002 ** <stu> what does y/// stand for? <tenderpuss> why, yansliterate of course. [ I'm looking for programming work. If you like my work, let me know. ] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]