Hey all, I have been trying to come up with a regular expression that can detect a name in a flat-file database. The flatfile has some info. lets say for example i got a flat-file for a Dentist office and i want to add a new patient to this file if he is not present. simple enough right!
But wait, i got patients that share parts of a name.

Example:
Don Phillie Johnson
Alexander simon
simon DeGauo
simon DeGauo Henderson
Alex Johnson
Alex Johnson Stevens

You see i need to come up with somewhat of a smarter regex that can go do this. Now one thing that i forgot to mention in the scenerio is that the flat-file has different doctors.
so if you had something like the following it is ok:
123!simon DeGauo!rm-200!Dr. Andre
123!simon DeGauo!rm-200!Dr. Banks
Now you see i am gonna have to do a regex that looks at both the patient name (variation sensative) and the doctor.
I know the explanation is not the best but i think you guys can look at the follwing and get a clue also. 

$patient = "Alex";
$new_doc = "Kessler";

open (REC, "record.data");
@data = <REC>;
close (REC);

foreach $line (@data) {
        my ($id, $patient, $room, $doc) = split (/!/, $line);
        if (($patient =~ /($new_patient)/i) && ($doc =~ $new_doc)) {
                print "$line\n";
        } else {
                print "NO PATIENT BY THAT NAME\n"; 
}

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In reply to regular expression issue by data67

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