[Omaha.pm] Hello Perl Gurus

[Simons, Tony]

Please excuse the test message in reply to Paul's Message.  I did some
printf's in the code to test the output.  The result Paul is seeing is only
on the first record and it's happening in the first occurance of:

my $firstDir = substr ($patientId...

if I print the values of $patientId and $hospitalId before the substr the
data appears to be correct.

I also tried something since the data is numeric in nature.  I tried:
my $patientId = int $ids[0];

 which resulted in the following as an error since it's not text.

M-oM-;M-?514027

So it appears to be something that's happening with the substr and the data
in the file.  I see no special characters in the file itself using vi :set
list  I also did a dos2unix on the file to make sure it's using the right
format.   I have read that there are problems with perl and files in UTF-8
format.  Is that a potential problem?
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