Building a Perl program to acess a set of data - arrays

Question

I have to write a Perl program that is able to read the social security baby names for a specific year, and have a person be able to enter a name, and be told weather it is male or female, how many people were born with that name, and where it falls in rank.
So far I have been able to separate the data into two separate arrays based on gender, but have to no idea where to go from here.
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
open (FILE, "ssbn1898.txt");
print <FILE>;
close (FILE);
my #M_array;
my #F_array;
open (my $input, "<", 'ssbn1898.txt');
while ( <$input> ) {
chomp;
my ( $name, $gender ) = split ( /,/ );
if ( $gender = "M" ) {
push ( #M_array, $name );
}
else {
push ( #F_array, $name );
}
}
close ( $input );
print 'M: ' . join("\t", #M_array) . "\n";
print 'F: ' . join("\t", #F_array) . "\n";
http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/popularnames.cgi
This is the data I am working with.

Answer 1

So far you have 2 arrays for each gender. Now the pending tasks are
Input: Allow users to input a name
Output: Male or Female
Output: Number of people with that name
To take input from user you could do
my $userinput = <STDIN>;
Then you might need to chomp the $userinput and then check whether the $userinput is in array 1 or array 2. For that you will have to use grep or loops. Doing that you'd be able to find whether name belongs to array with Male names or Females.
if (grep /$userinput/, #male_names) {
print "found $userinput in male list\n";
}
Using loop you could do something like below to find total number of people with that name:
foreach (#male_names){
$counter++ if $userinput eq $_;
}
PS: grep returns list, so if you use a scalar you could find number of matches, so you don't have to go for loops.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
my #male_names = qw(Raj Rohan John Jim Tony Raj Rohan Jim Jim);
my #female_names = qw(Natasha Neha Neha Jasmine Rita Rosy);
my $matches;
my $userinput = <STDIN>;
chomp ($userinput);
if ( $matches = grep /$userinput/, #male_names ) {
print "found $userinput in male list, count is $matches \n";
}
elsif ( $matches = grep /$userinput/, #female_names ) {
print "found $userinput in female list, count is $matches \n";
}
else{
print "Did not find name";
}