Greetings,
Once again I must turn to the Monks for some help. The code below is meant to search a text file and it does not do it, but I feel that I am close.
I have a text file named fai.txt The information in it is laid out as follows;

blah|blah|blah|blah
this|this|this|this

the fields are all seperated by |
when a part number is entered I want to search the text file and if the first field matches the part number entered then I want that entire string to be printed to the screen.
One of the error messages I get is that "Global symbol @fields requires explicit package name" I though I declared it in the subroutine. I would appreciate any poke in the right direction on this. Thanks, Kerry 
print "What is the Part Number that you would like to look up?\n";
my $PartNumber = <STDIN>;
chomp($PartNumber);
while (!$PartNumber){ ## while $PartNumber is empty keep asking
   print "PartNumber? ";
   $PartNumber = <STDIN>;
   chomp($PartNumber);
}

  &search;
   

#this is the subroutine to search the file

sub search{
open(FILE, '>>fai.txt') ||  die $!;
 
 while (<FILE>) {
        chomp;                  # remove newline
        my @fields = split(/\|/, $_);

        # test whether the search string matches part number
    if ($fields[0] =~ /$PartNumber/ ) {
                print "$PartNumber Rev. $Revision has a First Article 
+Report\nWould you like to view it?";
    }
}}

close(FILE);



my $answer = <STDIN>;

chomp($answer);


if ($answer eq "yes") {
   print "\n\n\none second please......\n";
   print "retrieving file........\n";
<b>error caused by this--></b> print "$fields[0]: $fields[1]: $fields[
+2]: $fields[3]\n";
} 
# If the answer is no then die
   else {
       print "ok, well have a nice day.\n";
   }

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credo quia absurdum

update (broquaint): s|<(/)?pre>|<${1}code>|g

In reply to pulling information from a delineated text file using a subroutine by Bismark

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