Ok, here's (I hope) a little clarification. here's a big snipet of code
my @dat_files = <$board_dir/*.dat>;
$q = 0;
foreach (@dat_files) {
    $number;
    $number = $_;
    $number =~ s/\/var\/www\/cgi-bin\/2930forum\/data\///g;
    $number =~ s/\.dat//g;
    open THREAD, "$_" or die "Can't open .dat file: $!";
    $x = 0;
    while (<THREAD>) {
        $thread_data[$x] = $_;
         $x++;
     }
     close THREAD;
     foreach (@thread_data) {
         @details = split /\|/, $_;
         if ($details[4] =~ m/\Q$in{for}\E/i) {
             $found[$q] = $number;
              $q++;
         }
    }
}

[download]
It's a little sploppy at this point, but I'm just trying to get valid results at this point, I'll clean it up later.

$in{for}: is defined my form input (I've been using simple searches like "cheese")
$thread_data[4]: is the messages posted in every thread. I could potentially contain just about anything except empty.
$thread_data[0]: I just realized isn't used. Insted it's $number. Which is just a number string denoting the thread number

I do the search and get results. Some of the threads contain the searchword $in{for} and others do not. For example I put in $in{for} = cheese and get around 30 results containing messages like:
Hard work pays off after time, but lazyness always pays off now.

One thing I just noticed is that many of the results are in numerical order. for example I get results like 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 21, 282 ,321, 343, 344, 345, etc

In reply to Re: Re: Search string giving incorrect results by Bishma
in thread Search string giving incorrect results by Bishma

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