Re: Phone Number Storage

[Brovnik]

It would be better to store the data in a format which allows you to parse it in later in the same program or in a future version.

As a start, use ',' as a separator, rather than ' ', otherwise it is difficult to know where the name ends and the email starts. E.G.

Frank Wright [e-mail] 212-04567-98
Frank Lloyd Wright [e-mail] 212-04567-98

(Yes, you could write a whizzy regex to anchor the email, but a separator is easier).

print FILEHANDLENAME join(',',$name,$num,$email),"\n";

This would allow you later to search only the name, by splitting the input as in comes in. Otherwise you are also matching on the email address which may not be what you want. (In my eaxmple above, a search for 'lloyd' would have matched both lines.

use strict; # This should go at the top of the file
use warnings; # So should this, to catch errors.

open FILE, "<storage.txt" or die $@; # report error on failure
while (<FILE>)
{
   my ($name,$email,$number) = split(/,/,$_);
   if ($name =~ /$name2/i)
   {
       print "$_\n";
   }
}

Things to think about later :

• What happens if the name added contains a ',' ? (Hint: consider using Text::CSV)
• How about adding command line access, e.g. easy -R Frank (Hint: consider Getopt::Std)
• If you are going to add more options later, (such as the ability to delete or change a name), how would you make the code maintainable ? (Hint: consider putting the actions each into their own subroutine)

--
Brovnik