Mmmm, where to start?

++ for using the strictures use strict; and use warnings;!

You do know that you do not have to "pre-declare" the keys of your hash? my %info; is enough to make use strict; happy.

It is considered beter to use as your filehandle a lexical variable, so open my $filehandle, ... would have given you extra points. And when your lexical variable goes out of scope, the file is closed automatically.

The three argument version of open is again considered a better practice:

open my $filehandle, '>>', 'C:\Documents and Settings\m\Desktop\info.t
+xt'
[download]

++ for checking the return value of the open.

You do know that '>>' is opening the file in append mode, i.e. it retains it previous contents? That may be exactly what you want, so I am not criticizing this.

Finally the loop can be re-written as follows (and it answers your third question):

foreach my $key (qw/name Specialization age/){
    print "enter your $key\n";
    $info{$key} = <STDIN>;
    chomp $info{$key}; # get rid of the EOL
    print $filehandle "$key: $info{$key}\n";
}
[download]

Do not put single quotes around a variable ($info{$key} rater than $info{'$key'}) as it will be taken as a string literal and not as a variable.

Unless you want to keep the EOL character at the end of each answer, use chomp to get rid of it.

Finally, don't use <> unless you know what you are doing. The docs say as follows:

The null filehandle <> is special: it can be used to emulate the behavior of sed and awk. Input from <> comes either from standard input, or from each file listed on the command line. Here's how it works: the first time <> is evaluated, the @ARGV array is checked, and if it is empty, $ARGV[0] is set to "-", which when opened gives you standard input. The @ARGV array is then processed as a list of filenames. The loop

    while (<>) {
        ...                     # code for each line
    }
[download]

is equivalent to the following Perl-like pseudo code:

    unshift(@ARGV, '-') unless @ARGV;
    while ($ARGV = shift) {
        open(ARGV, $ARGV);
        while (<ARGV>) {
            ...         # code for each line
        }
    }
[download]

except that it isn't so cumbersome to say, and will actually work. It really does shift the @ARGV array and put the current filename into the $ARGV variable. It also uses filehandle ARGV internally--<> is just a synonym for <ARGV>, which is magical. (The pseudo code above doesn't work because it treats <ARGV> as non-magical.)

I bet you didn't know that!

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.