Shell Programming and Scripting

I have a matrix , how do I compare all the elements of a column , lets say I want to check if the columns contain the alphabets "S","H","A","R","A","T".
and not "X"s.

Lets say matrix looks something like this ..

SSSXSH
HHXXHA
AAXXAT
RRRXRS
AAXTAR
TTTTTA




I can hard code it where $AA[0][$j] , $AA[1][$j] , $AA[2][$j] .. is the row and column ... like this ..


for($j=0;$j<$len;$j++){
if($AA[0][$j] eq "what goes here??" && $AA[1][$j] eq "A" && $AA[2][$j] eq "A"){
print "blah blah \n";
exit;}
else{}
}



what I would like to do is put it in 2 for loops like this...

for($i=0;$i<3;$i++){
for($j=0;$j<$len;$j++){
if($AA[$i][$j] eq one of the characters S,H,A,R,A,T..what I do here??? ){
print "blah blah \n";
exit;}
else{}
}
}

Tips ideas and code are welcome.

my solution is in Python, could be converted to Perl easily.

Code:

matrix =  [ 'SSSXSH',
	'HHXXHA',
	'AAXXAT',
	'RRRXRS',
	'AAXTAR',
	'TTTTTA' ]


for x in range( len(matrix[0] ) ):  # matrix[0] is SSSXSH        
	row =  [ matrix[y][x] for y in range(len(matrix)) ] #['S', 'H', 'A', 'R', 'A', 'T']
	if "SHARAT" == ''.join(row):
		print "Found SHARAT at column" , x

how do you do it in perl?
What is the conditionals that I need to use?I`m sure theres a simple way to do it...

SSSXSH <---X
HHXXHA
AAXXAT
RRRXRS
AAXTAR
TTTTTA

|
y


pseudocode:

Code:

get values into matrix array..such that SSSXSH is first element and so on
loop through length of x 
        loop through length of y (length of whole matrix array)
              get value of matrix[y][x] and store in array
        compare array with SHARAT

I'm not exactly sure what you're looking for, but perhaps you could use a regular expression to match the characters here:
Maybe something like this:

Code:

if ( $AA[$i][$j] =~ m/SHARAT/ )