I'm a Perl newbie/novice who managed, with GREATLY appreciated help from this forum about a year ago (THANKS!), managed to rework/code a script for a site guestbook into exactly what I wanted. That was: a simple chat room for my town.
However, now I'd like to add a user search function to my site. The web pages I'd want to scan are all in one folder/sub-dir (/Hist) and are named in style of "h0512.html" where it's YYMM after "h". There is a special comment that delimits the start and end of actual user data within the page, and each comment/post is delimited by "hr" or "HR" tags. There can be multiple lines in each post, using "BR" tag but the comment is always separated from signature by a "/B" tag.
To better show what I have as data, here is a condensed page with some sample data: 
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD><META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charse
+t=iso-8859-1">
<TITLE>Last Post </TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<!--begin-->
<HR>
<b>Comment 1</b><br>
Doug &lt;<a href="mailto:hun@tele.com">hun@tele.com</a>&gt;<br>
USA - Thu 01/05/2006 - 22:05:51
<hr>

<b>Comment 2</b><br>
J H<br>
Clearwater, FL USA - Wed 01/04/2006 - 02:05:12
<hr>
<!--end -->
</BODY></HTML>

[download]
What I'd like to do is first provide a way to find all posts by a certain user.
Creating the input form is not a problem for me, but how to do the search is. I know that I'll have to have a loop to read each month's history file and then a loop to scan thru entries, so how to do that is my first task. Then locating the signature line while keeping the post data saved so I can output it to a on-the-fly results web page is another issue.
So...are there any pre-existing code blocks or routines that I can adapt to this? I'd just like some good pointers on where to look...not expecting anyone to do the code!

In reply to Search function for guestbook history? by JCHallgren

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