"What we want," said our client, "is a system that will tell visitors what telephone number they should ring according to which STD telephone code area they are located in."

The application was a web site for a company which had francisees all over the country. Visitors were to type in their own STD code and receive the phone number of their local agent.

Fair enough. With the original data being supplied as an Excel file, we created a Perl script that requests the web site visitor's STD code, and matches that to the list. If there is no exact match, a national phone number is shown. And for large areas, like London and Birmingham, a full list of areas and phone numbers is presented.

The script was written in such a way that if more franchises are added...

...the data file is simply altered and uploaded again - no changes to the script itself are required.

And the page which is served to the visitor is based on a template - so if the look and feel of the site is changed, only the template file has to be altered; another time saver.

A simple and elegant script - and another happy customer!