All,
What I need is that if I was parsing some data and there is no value (spaces) it should print ***** so that the next thing I will print after it would not be printed out immediately. Ex. of output I want VISUALID XXXX 123456 1023 123457 1354 **** 1789 This is what happens if no value is found VISUALID XXXX 1789 SCRIPT as follows: while ($_=<SUMM>) { ##file is open### { if (/_visualid_(.*)/) { { if ($length < 2); { ##what im doing is that if the string length is less than 2 print ***) print "***\t"; } else { print "$1\t";} }} if (/_xxxx_(.*)/) { print "\t$1_"; } thanks, Nix