Howdy monks.

I've run into a bit of a quandary. I've decided to write a simple guestbook for my website, and I want to use a flat file text database so I don't have to use up more space on jcwren's server than I need to, and, I haven't done flat file work in ages, so I thought it would be good excercise.

Now, I can write to, read from, even possibly replace and delete some text (a stretch...but hypothetically possible by me, but I'm notoriously terrible at regexen) from a text file (delimited by some convenient character.) However, I have no clue how to construct any sort of regex to match terms from a search against a text file.

So I've thought, "Well I could cheat, and use something like DBD::CSV, or I could actually learn how to do it." My question is, should I do it myself in this case, or should I just cheat (because I obviously SHOULD learn to do it myself, at some point in time at least)?

If one looks at the pro's/cons, some pros of doing it myself would be:

  1. I know how to, and wouldn't have to post about it in the future,and
  2. 2. I could possibly understand the modules that already do it out there better.
Some cons of doing it myself might be:
  1. I could make a mistake,
  2. re-invent the wheel, and
  3. waste time.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated monks.

meh.

In reply to To learn to search flat files or to cheat... by stonecolddevin

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