I tried doing 'if' commands to cover all the possible combinations the user wants to search for, but the coding is way to long and to many possible cominations!

Load your search criteria into a hash. Load each record into a hash. Then, to see if a record matches, do 

  $match = 1;
  foreach $key ( keys %search ) {
      $match = 0, last if $record{$key} ne $search{$key};
  }
  if ( $match ) {
      printresults($record);
  }

[download]
What this doesn't handle is a search for a 35-45 year old single women in Silicon Valley who appreciates gearheads. Fortunately, I married one.

In reply to Re: Search Categories - Most efficient way by dws
in thread Search Categories - Most efficient way by perleager

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.