In kind of an atempt to get me to program something worth something, I came upon the idea of making an address book. (hey, maybe someday a "little black book!" ha!) Although as of now, I haven't nailed down the interface side, I have some ideas:

That can all be handled later. My question deals with the data part of the program. I'm pretty sure that I want to put the data in a text file (I don't know THAT many women!), read the text file, and store it in the program as a hash of a hash using peoples nicknames (helps to keep it unique) as the keys . i.e.:

%addys = (
     reallyhotchick => {
                 phone=>'555.555.5555', 
                 name=>'Jane Shmoe', 
                 cell=>'555.555.5555', 
                 nick=>'reallyhotchick'}...)

What would be the best way to go about this? (field delimitation, how to get the data into the variables, etc) Is this a stupid way to go about this? I've tried a few things, but I always screw them up somehow. This is really a learning project for me. I will of course post the code upon finishing, but I don't expect to be life changing. If you think there's a better way (leaving out DB's to keep it simple) I open to suggestions. Thanks for your time.

In reply to writing an address book program by mexnix

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