i have a table like this:

rowid   course1   course2   course3  course4
marge   psychology   math   engineering   pe
roy   math   reading   art   cooking
etc.
one of these fields will have lots of text with line breaks.

i have a form.  the form will send a request to a cgi, passing a value
+ which matches a value in "rowid" from the table.  

i need to open the file that contains the table, find the row that mat
+ches the value passed by the form, read that row into an array (or ha
+sh?) and print it out in html.

i'm able to open the file and put it into an array and print it, but i
+ don't know enough perl yet to take just the row i want and assign la
+bels to each value.
[download]

Okay, use <> (see "I/O Operators" in the perlop manpage) to read successive lines of your table. For each line you read, use split (perlfunc)to split up the line into an array (perldata) and if (perlsyn) to check if it's the right one. If it is, you can use a hash slice (perldata again) to easily assign the row's values to a hash to be used.

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $rowid = $ARGV[0] || 'roy';

my %data = ();
my @fields = split(/\t/, <DATA>);
chomp @fields;

while(<DATA>) {
    chomp;     
    my @row = split(/\t/);
    if ($row[0] eq $rowid) {
        @data{@fields} = @row;
        last;
    }        
}
 
if ( keys %data ) {
    # found, display data
    print Dumper \%data;
}
else {
    # not found, show error
    print STDERR "Can't find row '$rowid'\n";
}
 
__DATA__
rowid   course1 course2 course3 course4
marge   psychology  math    engineering pe
roy math    reading art cooking
[download]

So now you'll need to replace reading from DATA with reading from an open filehandle, use CGI to get the $rowid passed from the form and put whatever HTML you want in the found/not found sections.

Good luck.

thanks tilly :) that worked. first success in 2 days. i appreciate the help.

thanks eg. i guess i thanked tilly for this one by mistake. your solution worked well.