Make a separate program to write to the text files (hey, Perl is great, right?) delimitered by some special character (~,;;,^, etc.).

In your address book program, make it read from the file that you've already wrote to with the other program and split the lines on that special character.

this is a quick hack:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $del = '~';
my $file="file.txt";
my %hash;
open(DB,"$file") || die "$!";

while(<DB>){
    
    my ($nick,$phone,$name,$cell) = split/$del/; #split on $del.
    %_ = (nick=>"$nick",phone=>"$phone",name=>"$name",cell=>"$cell");
    $hash{$nick}={%_};
}            


print Data::Dumper->new([\%hash],[qw(hash)])->Indent(2)->Quotekeys(0)-
+>Dump;
# the above is from the Data::Dumper tutorial on this site.
[download]

This works for me and I am not aware of anyother way to do it. I will post the program to write to the file in a little bit. Hope i helped, goodbye

UPDATE: Here is the program to write to the database file.

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use CGI qw/param textfield start_form end_form Tr Td table h2 submit/;

my $file ="file.txt";
my $del ='~';

my $nick = param('nick');
my $phone= param('phone');
my $name = param('name');
my $cell = param("cell");

#----------- ...I love character classes :) ----


stuff();

if ($nick && $phone && $name && $cell){
    $nick  =~ s/[^A-Za-z_.]//;
    $phone =~ s/[^0-9\-]//g;
    $cell  =~ s/[^0-9\-]//g;
    open(DB,">$file") || die "$! DEAD!";
    select DB;
    print $nick,$del,$phone,$del,$cell; # this or the alternative
                # print "$nick$del$phone$del$cell";  confusing eh?
    select STDOUT;
    print "All done :-)" && exit;
    close DB;
}else{print"<BR><BR>\n Nothing has been submitted to put in the file, 
+yet.";
}

sub stuff{
    print start_form;
    print h2({-align=>'center'},"Add to the Bitch Book :)");
    print table({-width=>'300'},Tr(Td(
    "Nickname: "),Td(textfield(-name=>'nick', -override=>1),"\n<BR>"))
+,
    Tr(Td(
    "Phone Number: "), Td(textfield(-name=>"phone", -override=>1),"\n<
+BR>")),
    Tr(Td(      
    "Name: "), Td(textfield(-name=>"name", -override=>1),"\n<BR>")),
    Tr(Td(
    "Cell phone number: "), Td(textfield(-name=>'cell', -override=>1))
+)),
    submit, end_form;
}
[download]

Yay! I am *such* a bored XP whore... :)

Tiptoeing up to a Perl hacker.
Dave AKA damian