Compare 2 files string and parse data

DHS

Hi
I' m trouble with two files with about 1500 enties I need to put together.

The first one which need the year last digit
GAMEX( 199 , 3NinjasKickBack, 0, cps3, cps3, nocpu, ROT0, ---, “3 Ninjas Kick Back”, GAME_NOT_WORKING|GAME_NO_SOUND )

The second one from which I want to get the year
3 Ninjas Kick Back /B ;0 ;Action #1994 ;0 ;6756;USA;;

My logical approach is:

call both files
compare the name on each line
if same name copy the year from file2
paste $year in file1
if not go to next line in file2
go to next line
loop

Can we do that this way or is their an easyer (clever) way to do that ?
Any help is welcome.

etully

My logic would be:

Read contents of file #2 into an array. (name,year)
Start loop through file #1
Read each line, see if the name is in the array.
If Yes, then update the year in file #1 with the year from the array
End loop

This way, you only have to read the contents of file #2 once which speeds thing up considerably. You can do this because there are only 1500 entries. If there were a million entries, you might not have enough RAM so you might consider storing the name/year in a database and then loop through file #1 updating the year from the record that matches the name in the database.