Matching 2 Keywords to retreve information

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I need help badly.... I had a program to retrieve information from the datafile unfortunatelly, my program did not run as I expected. I had a datafile.txt with the following information:


User Name           UserID         Phone#

I am looking for a program something to match User Name with the USer 
+ID, if the User Name and UserId are matched then, it print out the ph
+one#.

My program at this time is not mathing the user Name and USer ID but m
+atching all including the Phone#. So when I put User Name = myname an
+d USerID=1, the output is all the phone # that had a number 1, and th
+e UserId that had a 1 #.

Please, if anyone have a simple program like this ..please help. I wou
+ld appreciate your help.
Thanks
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Re: Matching 2 Keywords to retreve information by runrig (Abbot) on Sep 19, 2001 at 20:48 UTC
What code do you have so far? If its not too long (and it shouldn't be for this ~~homework~~ problem, then go ahead and post it.	[reply]
Re: Matching 2 Keywords to retreve information by jj808 (Hermit) on Sep 19, 2001 at 20:48 UTC
You could either create a regular expression to match both parts at the same time, or alternatively use the Perl `grep` function to match the username and userid individually. Using the following data file (phonebook.txt): `Jon:1:0123456789 Rob 1 0987654321 Sean 4 075312468 Tom-3-0111 222 333 Colin 3 0222 111 5555` [download] You could write something like `#! /usr/bin/perl my ($username,$userid) = @ARGV; undef @ARGV; my @phonebook = (<>); @phonebook = grep /\b$username\b/ , @phonebook; @phonebook = grep /\b$userid\b/ , @phonebook; print foreach(@phonebook);` [download] Then if you type `cat phonebook.txt \| match.pl Jon 1` [download] You will get `Jon:1:0123456789` Hope this helps, JJ Update: I do realise that the above code still has bugs, I'm just trying to give our brother Monk some pointers. For a more robust solution, you should really define a file format (e.g. colon-sperated values), then you could use `split` to ensure you are only matching against the right fields.	[reply] [d/l] [select]