First off, this is my 5th day trying to learn perl with absolutely NO previous programing experience. As a good first project, I am trying to create a text file with random data and then writing another program to pull out SOME of that data and make it presentable. Here is my first program and it seems to work well.

#!/usr/bin/perl use Locale::Currency::Format; use Text::CSV; use Data::Random qw(:all); use strict; use warnings; my @names = ( 'adrian','reid','evan','mike','fred','shane'); my @amount = (-100 .. 100); my $writefile = 'TextFile.txt'; open(my $fh, '>', $writefile) or die "Could not open file '$writefile' +$!"; for (my $count =30; $count >1; $count--) { my $randomnames = @names[rand @names]; my $random_date = rand_date(); my $randomamount = @amount[rand @amount]; $randomamount = currency_format('USD', $randomamount, FMT_SYMBOL); print $fh "$randomnames,$random_date,$randomamount\n"; } close $writefile; print "Write Successfully Completed\n"

The second half of this problem is where I get confused. I want to be able to search for a name (adrian for example) and see all the lines that contain the name sorted by date. This is all I have so far.

use Locale::Currency::Format; use Data::Random qw(:all); use strict; use warnings; my $readfile = 'TextFile.txt'; print "Search for a name: "; my $userinput = <>;

In reply to Reading and manipulating text files by TheRiz

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