I am still a beginner and am writing a very simple guestbook that writes the data to a file. My problem is that if the user should press the enter button while in the textarea to get a new line instead of waiting for the wordwrap then that also gets recorded to the file as a new line. When I read the file for output, anything on the new line(s) is missed because it is not a valid line containing an id number. How could I prevent this? 
    sub CheckForMsgs {    
        my $strMsg = '';
        my @MsgArray = ();
        my $MsgDate = 0;
        my $Message = '';
        my $GuestName = '';
        my $id = 0;
        my $colorflag = 0;
        my $bgcolor = "#FFFFCC";

# open the file for read
    open(DAT,"Guestbook.cgi") || die("Cannot Open  File:$!");
        @MsgArray = <DAT>;
    close(DAT);

 foreach $id (@MsgArray) {
    chomp ($id);
    ($id,$MsgDate,$GuestName,$Message)=split (/\|/,$id);

# alternate table row background color to contrast entries.
 if ($id%2 eq 1){
                $bgcolor = "#FFFFCC";
                $strMsg .= "\ <tr bgcolor=\"$bgcolor\"><td> $MsgDate <
+/td><td align=center> $GuestName </td><td> $Message </td></tr> \n";

        }

 else {
                 $bgcolor = "#DFDF00";
                $strMsg .= "\ <tr bgcolor=\"$bgcolor\"><td> $MsgDate <
+/td><td align=center> $GuestName </td><td> $Message </td></tr> \n";

        }

      }  

       return $strMsg;

    };
####End of Sub
    
sub WriteNewMsg {
    my @MsgArray = ();
    my $id = 0;
    my $NewMsg = '';
    my $GuestName = '';
    my $now_string = strftime "%a %b%e %H:%M %Y", localtime;
    my $NewID = 1;
    
    &ReadParse(*input);
    
# open the file for read
    open(DAT,"Guestbook.cgi") || die("Cannot Open  File:$!");
        @MsgArray = <DAT>;
    close(DAT);
 
  open(DAT,">>Guestbook.cgi") || die("Cannot Open File:$!");
 foreach $id (@MsgArray) {
    chomp ($id);
    ($id,$MsgDate,$GuestName,$NewMsg)=split (/\|/,$id);
    
    ++$NewID;
 }
 # add Event to file
    print DAT "$NewID|$now_string|$input{'txtGuestName'}|$input{'txtMs
+g'}\n";
    close(DAT);
    };

###End of Sub

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In reply to Simple guestbook problem. by engtech

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