Hey, this is a question for a first time perl user, so please excuse this :) I have to write a database system that reads in a file and places an address book into an array of hashes. Done. Then I have to take a query string from standard in that could look like

Name[James]

or

Name[James] && Phone[734]

or

!((Name[Mike]||(Name[James]))&&!Phone[313])

Please notice that I cannot use spaces as a way of breaking the string up. I am to read NOTs, ANDs, ORs, parens, and queries into seperate arrays in the order they apppear in the query and then do a shift/reduce pattern on them to search the database. However, I cannot even parse the string. Some people in class used a search and replace; another used grep and split in one line to do so. I cannot get any of them. I would think that grep and split would work best, but I can't figure out how to do any of them. If someone could help me here, or even go so far as how to perhaps use a series of recursive subroutines to get results, I would appreciate it. Thanks!

-james

p.s. - ok, I noticed that the names are now underlined - they are supposed to be surrounded by square brackets... my apologies, I'm not sure what's happening lol

In reply to Perl database system by jimmyfo

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