in reply to Using Perl to Implement a simple Searchable Web Database

Is this a reasonable thing to do in Perl

Sounds very reasonable and perfectly suited to Perl, but we'll need a bit more background info. What 'pertinent information' are you looking for exactly? How is the data structured? etc.

In addition, you might want to consider using an existing solution such as Perlfect Search.

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Re: Re: Using Perl to Implement a simple Searchable Web Database
by Anonymous Monk on May 28, 2002 at 17:37 UTC
    Sorry for the vagueness On the web server is a CSV Excel file, which is basically a spreadsheet that is readable as a text file. It seperates columns using a comma, and rows by going to the next line. The first element in each line is a unique part number. Information that follows it (seperated by commas) would be things like price, location, etc. The user on the website would type in a part number and the page would return the price, location, etc. information. This may seem like a very simple problem, but I have never used Perl in a practical application yet, so I'd like to use it here. Thanks, Doug
[reply]
      There are modules available to parse CSV files. But you might want to consider preprocessing the file into a DBM file, or a database, depending on the size of the file.

      Abigail

[reply]

      This should get you started...

      #!/usr/bin/perl -wT

use strict;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI;

my $number_to_find = $q->param("number");

open DATA, "data.txt" or die "Can't open file: $!";

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my @fields = split /,/;

    if ($fields[0] eq $number_to_find) {
        print_to_browser(@fields);
    }
}

close DATA;


sub print_to_browser {
    my @data = @_;
    print $q->header("text/html"),
          $q->start_html("Error"),
      $q->h1("Relevant Data"),
      $q->p(@data),
      $q->end_html;
}

      [download]

      That's definately not the prettiest code, but it should give you an idea of what you need to do. You'll probably also want to read some of the CGI.pm docs and do a search or two on cpan for "CSV" to find some relevant modules.

[reply]
[d/l]
        Thanks for your help, I just found out that the web server I am working on supports CGI and Perl (or so they say) I'll be testing it out to make sure. Thanks again! :-D
[reply]

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