Re: reading from file.

[ramlight]

It looks to me like you may have your logic backwards. For any list of with more than one name, it will always print "not valid". I suspect that you meant something like

if input_name is in list:
  print "valid"
else:
  print "not valid"

This could be implemented with the following code:
if (grep(/^$input$/, @names) {
  print "Valid\n";
} else {
  print "Not valid\n";
}

There are a number of other areas that could be cleaned up. For example, you probably should read the list of valid names before getting your name to test. A little more consistency in your use of brackets would also make your code easier to figure out (both for you and for us.)

[scripter87]

thanks for the feedback. The basic thing I am trying to grasp is.. how to read files from a file for login purposes, so if I enter a name that is not in the file it obviously shouldnt work but as I said at the moment if I have just one line in the file it works ok but if more than one it doesnt.

[Kenosis]

Although there are several solutions for your task, consider the following:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $names = 'names.txt';
my ( $found, $name );

print 'Enter a name: ';
chomp( my $input = <STDIN> );

open my $fh, '<', $names or die "Cannot open $names: $!\n";

while ( $name = <$fh> ) {
    chomp $name;

    if ( $input eq $name ) {
        $found++;
        last;
    }
}

close $fh;

if ($found) {
    print qq{The name "$input" was found.\n};
}
else {
    print qq{The name "$input" was not found.\n};
}

Note that:

• The name to search for is requested first.
• chomp is used to remove the trailing input record separator (usually \n), from both the entered name and the names from the file.
• The names' file is read once; no hash or array is necessary to 'hold' the names (Why process the list twice?). A flag's set and the while loop is immediately exited if the name is found.
• Appropriate responses are given depending upon the value of $found.

Hope this helps!

[Eily]

You should have tried the solution ramlight gave you, it does look like what you were looking for. Maybe grep { $_ eq $input } @names instead of grep(/^$input$/, @names) would avoid some trouble with the metacharacters in $input though. And if you don't understang what it does, try and read grep's documentation :).

Another way to do it would be using a hash, because you have exists to check if a name exists (obviously) in it.

my @nameList = qw/Anna Beatrix Claude Damian/;
my %names = map { $_ => 1 }, @nameList; # associate the value 1 to eac
+h name in @namelist. Actually the value could be anything in this cas
+e
print "Anna exists" if exists $names{"Anna"};
print "Paul doesn't exist" unless exists $names{"Paul"};

And as taint already stated, chomp your strings :)

[taint]

Thinking out loud;

chomp ...
foreach line as line ...

Well, something like that.

--Chris