Hi, trying to match a record in a flat file db.

I manage to do that as follows:
The db: data.txt
------------------------
000210|anything
000211|something
000212|wotathing
------------------------

The ID (number) is typed into a form and sent to match script - the core of which is as follows:

Code:

## open datalist put in array open (ORGDB,"$datalist "); # flock(DATA, 2); @ODB=<ORGDB>; close (ORGDB); # read in data foreach $rec (@ODB){      chomp($rec);      ($rfn,$nam)=split(/\|/,$rec);  if($rfn =~m/$theid/)    {     print "($rec)<br>\n";    }  else    {    print "No match<br>\n";    } } exit;

It returns it okay but looks like this

The Record
(000210|anything)
No match
No match

or  (depends which record ID is used)

The Record
No match
(000211|something)
No match

I know I can get rid of the else and only the match returns.

But is that correct? Is the script keeping on looping behind the scenes?
(it doesn't seem to but I'm not sure)

cheers - Ted

It looks fine, Ted ... the loop will teminate when all the records have been looked through and no process will be left running.

If you're only looking for one matching record and can abandon the search once you've found it, add a "last" statement after you've printed the matching record.

If your datafile might get large, don't read it all in to a list at the beginning - instead, use a loop of the form
while ($rec=<ORGDB>) {
which will cause the data to be read, and analysed as it is read.  That's different to the scrit you supplied, which read the whole file into a list then processes it item by item - great for a few lines, but not so good if you're going to end up with hundreds of thousands of lines of data.


Like this Graham?

Code:

while ($rec=<ORGDB>) {      chomp($rec);      ($rfn,$nam)=split(/\|/,$rec);  if($rfn =~m/$theid/)    {     print "($rec)<br>\n";    } } close (ORGDB); exit;

It seems to work okay. At first I used the last statement with it and it didn't like that. Picks up the record fine.

Looks fine ... don't know why it didn't work with "last" ...

Code:

while ($rec=<ORGDB>) { ($rfn,$nam)=split(/\|/,$rec);  if($rfn =~m/$theid/)    {     print "($rec)<br>\n";     last;    } } close (ORGDB); exit;

which really only makes it a bit more effieicnt - stops searching once it's matched.


on 09/17/06 at 15:04:15, Graham Ellis wrote:

Looks fine ... don't know why it didn't work with "last" ...

'cuz I put it in the wrong place  

OK now

cheers - Ted

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