Thanks for your help guys. In giving more thought to the problem, what I want to do is not hand edit the flat text file, but rather build an admin menu, so I can enter new services when needed.
Also I wanted to get rid of the hash at the beginning of my program, which has the services in it and having to update it by hand. Instead I wanted to populate the hash with whatever is in the flat text file
Does anybody know how I can do this?