SAMS Teach Yourself Perl in 24 Hours THIRD EDITION

Exercise: A Free-Form Memo Pad

Now that you have an easy way to keep data on the disk, it's time to put it to good use. This exercise presents a free-form memo pad that keeps information based on keys and allows you to search and retrieve that information with simple queries.

A sample session with the program (called memopad) is shown in Listing 15.1.

To query the memopad program, simply type the name of a topic, followed by a question mark. To program in a new fact, type a phrase in the form “X is Y”, where X is the topic and Y is the information to associate with that topic. You can search the database for similarities by typing “like pattern?” where pattern is a regular expression to search for in the topics. All topics matching that expression ...