I admit, after making my post and taking a break, I had gotten a little ahead of myself when stating this problem. Basically, I had reached a point where I was able to get to @arr3, and couldn't figure the rest out; the previous stuff I figured out. I felt I needed to come up with some background info and perhaps it just made things more confusing. More significantly, I also didn't know much of the correct terminology/what things were called officially...
If you're curious to know the background info (I wanted to make it as less specific as possible), I have a table in a MySQL database that contains a list of tailored information about other tables in that same database. Certain technicalities had forced me not to use InnoDB's and thus, I cannot use any foreign keys; the information within that table of tables is a way for me to automatically make those connections between tables. When I mentioned A and C in @arr1, A is a record that represents another table in that database, C likewise. B is also a record in the table, and there are references to A = B and B = C/they link together... Thus, if you're attempting to come up with a dynamic select query, you'll have to come up with some tricky coding to include all the tables that are given within the statement. ie, if you specify a field from one table, and a field from another, you'll have to specify something like this: SELECT A.field1, C.field1 FROM A, C; If I specify only A and C, it will return a very long list; basically, for every record in A, it will return the total # of records in table C, which means A * C records (a lot if there are just 10+ in each/ either... ) So, because A = B, and B = C, you have to include B in your statement, like so: SELECT A.field1, C.field1 FROM A, B, C WHERE A.fieldX = B.fieldY AND B.fieldZ = C.fieldX. The part after WHERE is a way of 'JOIN'ing the tables... If I want to specify just A, and just C, pass them to a perl sub, based on the ties of A = B, and B = C, I'd like to return A = B = C. If I have other records in that special table that have references of A and C, eg, A = D and E = C, I'd like to not include those because they don't 'share' B; so if I don't account for that, and include all of the tables that link to others, I'll limit my query even more (eg, SELECT A.field1, C.field1 FROM A, B, C, D, E WHERE A.fieldX = B.fieldY AND B.fieldZ = C.fieldX AND A.fieldY = D.fieldX AND C.fieldY = E.fieldX) If I don't specify D and E in the FROM, I'll get an error... So, basically, I only really need help on the part of 'merging' A = B and B = C to get only A = B = C, and not A = B = C = D = E (because of the example I just mentioned). It sounds so trivial, hence why I submitted this in this discussion. But, on the other hand, I don't know if it's something a bit more technical or if I've made this seem even more complicated or confusing... :-\ Oh, and with A = B and B = C, A = D and E = C, they can all be flipped, eg, D = A... I don't need to preserve the order of each 'set'... Really appreciate your help with this! -Nick -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://learn.perl.org/
