Can I have only one textarea (2columns 52rows) to accept all the states that she wishes to input and then parse that data?

OK, I wanted to just say "yes," because this really smells of homework (the restriction on the UI, for instance). But given that you *did* pose a specific question ...

CGI.pm isn't really the controlling factor. It depends on how the *user* enters it -- do they put line breaks or other spacers in themselves, or do they type it all in without spacers of any sort? So my advice is, in the HTML that presents the form with the text input field (be it an input field or a textarea), you tell the users what you want, and have your program proceed according to that. Visually easiest on you and on your users, I would think, is a comma or a space. Then, you just use split on the resulting string that you get using CGI.pm's param function. split is wicked-easy to use: 

my $string="these are the times that try men's souls";
my @words = split /\s/, $string;
# @words now holds "these", "are", "the" ... etc.

[download]

HTH

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'

[download]

In reply to Re: Entering data into MySql using CGI by arturo
in thread Entering data into MySql using CGI by La12

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