ROB,

Welcome to the world of programming. ;-) I would highly recommend some basic programming books or sites - they will explain details like this so much better than some of the riff-raff here (say, me). They'll lead you right through this type of hurdle. That's not to say people here won't give you the right answer, but the books will often go through many of the details and nuances of programming that will help you answer the question on your own later. Merely seeing the answer isn't enough - you have to understand it, and that's often what is lacking in many of the responses here, mine included. I would suggest that you look at the O'Reilly Perl on CD set - it should get you through all stages of perl programming. Or at least most of them. Good luck!

$|++; # make sure we turn off buffering.
print "Is the rock blue? yes or no: ";
my $response = <STDIN>;
chomp $response; # get rid of the enter key
if ($response eq 'yes')
{
  print "Great, it's blue!\n";
}
else
{
  print "Hmm - that stinks.  You need a blue rock.\n";
}
[download]

Your code only checks for "yes". If the user entered "Sure!", you would get the "Hmm - that stinks. You need a blue rock." answer. Better test for "no" too:

$|++; # make sure we turn off buffering.
print "Is the rock blue? yes or no: ";
my $response = <STDIN>;
chomp $response; # get rid of the enter key
if ($response eq 'yes')
{
  print "Great, it's blue!\n";
}
elsif ($response eq 'no')
{
  print "Hmm - that stinks.  You need a blue rock.\n";
}
else
{
  print "yes or no, boy!\n";
}
[download]

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

Hi ROB6789,

Based on your last post, you already know how to get some input from the user through the console (that's a Unix term I guess, in Windows it's the command prompt). In Perl, you use an "if" statement to have your program do different things based on a condition. And "eq" is how you compare two strings to see if they are equal. So you could say

my $var = <STDIN>;
if ($var eq "something") {
   # this code only gets called if $var contains "something"
} else {
    # this code only gets called if $var doesn't contain "something"
}
[download]