How do I skip an iteration step in a while loop in Perl?

Question

In Perl I'm trying to achieve this:

while ($row = <$fh>){
     if the row contains the character >:
          #do something AND then skip to the next line
     else:
         #continue to parse normally and do other things

Answer 1

You can skip to the next iteration of a loop with the next built-in. Since you are reading line by line, that's all you need to do.

For checking if the character is present, use a regular expression. That's done with the m// operator and =~ in Perl.

while ($row = <$fh>) {
  if ( $row =~ m/>/ ) {
    # do stuff ...
    next;
  }
  # no need for else
  # continue and do other stuff ...
}