hi, i want to find matched cases in my phonelist.txt file, and then save the results in an array so i can process them. for example, the phonelist.txt file consists of different fields separated by semicolons as: jon;555-5555;jon@hotmail.com kathy;444-4444;kathy@hotmail.com mark;333-3333;mark@hotmail.com jon;111-1111;jon@hotmail.com how do i conduct a search by name, by phone number, or by email address and then store the matched cases in an array? if i search for jon, then i should get two results, and i want to process these two results. thanks, jason

i need to clarify something: after the search, i want to save the entire record (that contains name, phone #, email address) of each result. for example, if i search for jon, then i should get two records of jon. then i can process each record accordingly. thanks, jason

You don't specify a language preference, so I'm going to pick the easiest for the task described. But depending on exactly what you want to do, there may be better answers. grep is a shell script command for search files for specified text. > grep jon phonelist.txt jon;555-5555;jon@hotmail.com jon;111-1111;jon@hotmail.com The command above searches for the string 'jon' in the file 'phonelist.txt'. Any lines containing 'jon', anywere in the line, are output. That's a pretty simple answer, but it answers the question that you asked.

Hi Jason, I suggest you use Awk. It's the best, when the no of records involved are more. Grep has a limitation as it does scan the whole file once for each string you search. Awk is powerful in a way that it works line by line. So, in you case if you had to use awk it would be like this: awk -F";" '$1=="The name you want"{print $0}' phonelist.txt Thereafter you could put conditions like AND , OR along with conditional statments of $1 above and get the required result. For storing in an array it's as simple as you do in C language. So go ahead anf start scripting :) ~deeps

thanks to deeps and don, i'd appreciate your help!