I have a tab delimited that looks somthing like this:

Name    City    Languages
Hong Xiao    Chongqing    English,Mandarin
Rob    Huston, TX    English,German,Japanese
Jess    Springfield, IL    English,French
Mike    Austin, TX    English,Perl,Java

[download]
ect...

I have written this very cute little program to let you find out who knows which language.

#!/opt/bin/perl -w
use strict;       # don't allow unsafe constructs

my ( $name, $city, $language, $search );
my $whole;
my $count = 1;
my $line;
my @matched;

print "What language would you like to search for? ";
$search = <STDIN>;
chomp $search;


#open the employees file
open (EMPLOYEES, "employees.txt");

#for each line
while ($line = <EMPLOYEES>) {

    #remove the carriage return
    chomp $line;

    #splits the line between tabs and get the different elements
    ($name, $city, $language) = split /\t/, $line;

next unless $language =~ /^$search/;

print "$name speaks $search\n";

}
close (EMPLOYEES);

[download]

The only problme is that right now it only works for the entry "English" because the other languages are buried English without spaces (only commas). What is the fastest way to parse the elements assigned to the $language $scaler?

Thanks for your time and any help offered.

In reply to A small comma parsing problem... by chinamox

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