It is fine to stay with array. Hope the following code helps:

Made a general purpose function to handle both replace and insert, and determines whether to insert or replace on its own:

use warnings;
use strict;

my @a = ("a=1", "b=2", "c=3");
print join(",", @a), "\n";
add("b", 22);#this replaces
print join(",", @a), "\n";
add("d", 45);#this inserts
print join(",", @a), "\n";

sub add {
    my ($key, $val) = @_;
    my $exists = 0;
    for (grep /^$key=/, @a) {
        $_ = "$key=$val";
        $exists = 1;    
    } 
    if (!$exists) {
        push @a, "$key=$val"
    }
}

[download]

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Inserting lines in a file with Tie::File if lines don't exist by pg
in thread Inserting lines in a file with Tie::File if lines don't exist by devgoddess

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