Need Simple Perl Help plz

mashficool has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Dear freinds,

Please let me know if anyone can give me that one line code that I need to put in my perl program that will really help me with my school homework.

I am very new to perl and struggling to write this simple program.

I have to write a CGI program that, given a user-specified search string, finds all words
(based on my /usr/share/dict/words file) that match this search string.

For example if I type " AN " in the search panel, the program will show me the related words from the dict file:

ANomaly

ANatomy

ANonymously

If I type "JAN" in the search panel, the program will show me:

JANuary

JANet

JANmiller

and so on ..

So far I came up with these set of codes:

$search='an';
open(W,"/usr/share/dict/words);
while (<W>) {
    print if m/$search/;
}
[download]

but it only searches for "an". What if I want to search for any word ?? What would the search string be ?

Help please

------------------------------------------------

Please help me. Regards, Mash

Comment on Need Simple Perl Help plz Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Need Simple Perl Help plz by Joost (Canon) on Jun 12, 2006 at 22:33 UTC
You should use the standard CGI module to get the $search input from the web form. You will also need to print HTML instead of plain text, and set a few headers. Read the documentation of the CGI module to see how to do all that. Note that certain characters need to be escaped if you want to plug them into a regular expression. Take a look at this recent thread that dealt with that problem. Good luck :-) "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply]
Re: Need Simple Perl Help plz by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jun 12, 2006 at 22:34 UTC
Sorry, I misunderstood the question. I thought the OP was saying he was only getting the word "an" returned. ~~Works for me, as it should.~~ ~~`Aani abaisance abandon abandonable abandoned abandonedly abandonee ... zygobranchiate zygopteran zygosporange zygosporangium Zyrenian Zyrian Zyryan`~~ ~~[download]~~ You'll need to add the missing quote first, of course. And you'd profit from making the search case-insensitive: `print if m/$search/i;` As an aside, please enclose your code in `<c>...</c>` tags.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Need Simple Perl Help plz by merlyn (Sage) on Jun 12, 2006 at 23:14 UTC
Homework! -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re^2: Need Simple Perl Help plz by jpeg (Chaplain) on Jun 12, 2006 at 23:24 UTC
perlbot, be mashficool -- jpg	[reply]