Hi. For a class, we're supposed to type out a program from the textbook, and then modify it to allow searching for names. When I first typed out the program, I couldn't get it to work, then, after changing a line as per the teacher's instructions, I got a whole whack of uninitialized warnings. At one point I had it doing the right thing when searching for e-mail addresses, but everything else came back not found. Now everything I search comes back not found.

Anyway, I'm not knowledgeable enough to be able to look at the program and see other mistakes that might have been in the text that the teacher didn't see (or, more likely, if I deleted or added something important).

If anyone could take a look and point me in the right direction, that would be great .


The text file:


This post has been edited by CatchThi5Drift: 4 Nov, 2009 - 09:41 AM

Both versions of this line are broken.

The original version will put the email address into $number, the name into $email, and nothing into $name. $name being undef would presumably be the cause of your original batch of "uninitialized value" warnings. The reason it does this is because Perl array indexes are 0-based; if you're going to specify indexes to pull from, your data will be appearing in 0, 1, and 2, not 1, 2, and 3.

Your changed version puts nothing into any of the variables because you're splitting on tabs and the fields do not appear to be tab-separated, so the entire string ends up in element 0 of the list, which you aren't storing anywhere. This could just be an artifact of DIC turning your tabs into spaces, but, even if it is, there was no need to change from \s to \t.

Note also that the fields in the data file are ordered name, number, email. The correct version of this split statement would, therefore, be eitheror (better)

You're also missing the "last" in your "if address" and "if name" clauses, causing it to incorrectly claim that the customer was not found after printing the customer record.

Aside from that, it seems to work in the way you appear to have intended.

(And then there's "use strict", lexical filehandles and three-arg open (i.e., "open $ph, '<', 'customers.txt' or die..."), but I recognize that you're just going by the book here and I'm pretty sure I explained those to you before, so you already know about them for when you start writing your own Perl. )

Hey, thanks for helping me again. The fields weren't tab separated; the book said not to worry about how we space them out. I've done them with tabs now, though, just so I can use the line my teacher gave us *shrug*.

I'm still getting a warning:



This post has been edited by CatchThi5Drift: 5 Nov, 2009 - 09:16 AM

The 8th line of input data contains only two tab-separated fields, so nothing is getting put into $email. Either it's missing a field or one of your separators is a space instead of a tab. (Which is a nice thing about using \s in the regex - it works with both tabs and spaces, so you don't have to worry about which is which.)

If you want to see what the offending line is, you can addanywhere after the split. Or if you want to see how the split divided it.

It was definitely a space instead of a tab for a separator. Thanks a lot for all your help .