Ah, this is classic split territory. Also, hashes were made for precisely this kind of thing, so let's roll that way, too. Now is as good of a time as any to give them a try, right?

The following code shows one way of doing what you want: 

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    use warnings;
    use strict;

    # read the files into a hash of ( filename => title )

    my %files;
    while (<DATA>) {
        chomp;  # get rid of line-ending
        if (my ($file, $title) = split ' ', $_, 2) {
            $files{$file} = $title;
        }
    }

    # print out the files in our hash, sorted by file name

    foreach my $file (sort keys %files) {
        my $title = $files{$file};
        print "$file = $title\n";
    }

    __DATA__
    RS0029.DOC    INTER UNIT HARNESS REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION

    RS0036.DOC    INSTRUMENT ELECTRONICS UNIT 
    RS0037.DOC    MECHANISM CONTROL ELECTRONICS
    RS0041.DOC    IOU DESCAN MECHANISM

    RS0042.DOC    IOU GENERIC MECHANISMS

[download]
(For convenience, I put the list of files in the code's __DATA__ section, but you'll read them from a separate file.)

The only tricky part is our split invocation, which says, "split lines on whitespace into two parts." If we're successful in splitting the current line, we get back the filename and its title, which we store in the variables $file and $title respectively. These, in turn, we store in a hash called, appropriately enough, %files.

The foreach loop shows how to read values out of the hash. I just print them out, but I trust that you can convert each into the appropraite hypertext link. Here's the code's output: 

    RS0029.DOC = INTER UNIT HARNESS REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION
    RS0036.DOC = INSTRUMENT ELECTRONICS UNIT 
    RS0037.DOC = MECHANISM CONTROL ELECTRONICS
    RS0041.DOC = IOU DESCAN MECHANISM
    RS0042.DOC = IOU GENERIC MECHANISMS

[download]

Cheers,
Tom

Tom Moertel : Blog / Talks / CPAN / LectroTest / PXSL / Coffee / Movie Rating Decoder

In reply to Re: searching a file, results into an array by tmoertel
in thread searching a file, results into an array by Anonymous Monk

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