"Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string"

[msmonkey]

Does anyone know what would cause the following warning and how to get rid of it?

"Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string"

I am using Strict in my module.

It happens during the following code:

open (INPUT, "expenses&quot || die "Error opening expense_categories";

while (<INPUT>) {
chomp;
my($date,$category,$amount) = split (/~/);
print &quot; #error happens here
<tr> <td>$date</td>
<td>$category</td>
<td>\$$amount</td>
</tr>&quot;;
}
close (INPUT);

 

[icrf]

At some point, your split isn't returning three results, and at least one of the three scalars you set by it aren't set at all, and are uninitialized. You're probably getting a few blank table entries, too. You might have a bad data file, or something like a blank line at the end that has no data to split on. You could check that split returned three values like this:

#instead of this:
my($date,$category,$amount) = split (/~/);

#use this:
my($date,$category,$amount);
if(scalar (($date,$category,$amount) = split (/~/)) == 3) {
[code]
And put your print inside the conditional.

Hope it helps.

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