I am trying to get this written for a presentation in the morning (gotta love it when the boss dumps a pile of stuff with 3 hours left in the day) and I have a massive file that is a flat file database (| delimited) that I need to sort through to get all the *** entries out of. The file format is this:
sub Itemslist { $database_file = "/home/web/sales/info/salesa1"; $trip = "***"; open(INF,$database_file) or dienice("Can't open $database_file: $! \n"); @grok = <INF>; close(INF); $file1 = "/home/web/sales/itemlist.html"; open (FILE, ">$file1") || die "Can't write to $file1 : error $!\n"; print FILE "<html><head><title>*** Item List</title></head><body bgcolor=white text=black>\n<table border=1>\n<tr><td><B>Item Num</B></td><td><B>Description</B></td><td><B>B2</B></td><td><B>Cat Code</B></td><td><B>Vendor Num</B></td></tr>\n"; foreach $i (@grok) { if ($i =~/$trip/) { chomp($i); ($item_num,$item_desc,$b1,$b2,$b3,$b4,$cat_code,$vend_num) = split(/\|/,$i); print FILE "<tr><td>$item_num</td><td>$item_desc</td><td>$b2</td><td>$cat_code</td><td> $vend_num</td></tr>\n"; } } print FILE "</table></body</html>\n"; } -------------------------------------------- The *** I have tried to escape with \*\*\* and /\*/\*/\* The entries is the $item_desc that contains the *** and when it DOES find one, it needs to print it out to the file, the others it needs to ignore. HELP! Robert -------------------------------------------------------------------- mail2web - Check your email from the web at http://mail2web.com/ . -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]