Have you tried anything thus far mate?

Just read up on CGI for the web aspect to the problem, and do basic file processing like below for searching for the record.

use strict;
use warnings;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    my @vals = split "\t";
    if ($vals[0] == 12345) {
        print "Bingo";
        last;
    }
}

__DATA__
12345    date    name    email
12346    date    name    email
12347    date    name    email
12348    date    name    email
12349    date    name    email
12350    date    name    email
[download]

This is REAL close, thank you.

Instead of "Bingo," though, I would like it to print out all of the variables on that line:

12345 date name email

EUREKA!

open (FILE, "<$ORDERS");
while (<FILE>) {
chomp;
my @vals = split "\t";
$order = $vals[0];
$Date= $vals1;
$name= $vals2;
$email= $vals3;

if ($vals[0] == $order) {
print "$order";
print "$Date";
print "$name";
print "$email";
last;
}

}
close (FILE);
exit;

THANK YOU!

Thanks, I have the web part figured out. I just would like help with the code that actually stores these values in a string.

Here's what I have so far, but it only prints out a dump of the entire text file:

print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

$ORDERS="../../orders.txt";

open (FILE, "<$ORDERS");
while (<FILE>) {
chomp;
($number, $Date, $name, $email) = split("\t");
print "Order: $number\n";
print "Date of Order: $Date\n";
print "Name: $name\n";
print "Email: $email\n";
print "---------\n";
}
close (FILE);
exit;

As you do more with Perl, also keep in mind CPAN ... the vast contributed-code library at http://search.cpan.org.   No matter what you are doing, it has probably been done before, and there is probably “an embarrassment of choices” in CPAN for doing even very complicated things.   In other words, as a general notion, “search before you write, because you might not have to write nearly as much original material as you first thought.”

“There’s More Than One Way To Do It™” ... including ways that you might never have thought of until you searched.