Hello Monks, I have been working on a rather basic script in Perl (using the CGI.pm module), and am combining it with Ajax. The problem is in my parsing abilities, which I am trying to handle completely in Perl, rather than in the javascript form validation with my Ajax. The Code is have so far is as follows:

use CGI qw(param);

$command = param("command");
$command =~ m/(!\w+\s?.+?)(?=!\w)/simg;
if ($command eq "") {
print "Add a command, man!\n";
} 
if $command ne "") {
if $command =~ /^\!Book/) {
print "Found a Book\n\n";
}

 elsif ($command =~ /^\!Number/) {
print "Time to log a phone number\n\n";
}

print "Command has the following in it : $command and was started at \
+n";
printf "Time %s\n", scalar(localtime);
print "Command 1 is $1\n";
print "And Command 2 is $2\n\n";
print "Command 3 is $3\n\n";


print "\n";
}


# (!\w+\s?)(.+?(?=!\w)) is the original regex I was using
[download]

The purpose of the script is to take a lot of input through a textarea, and split it based on various 'commands', all seperated by a !Command syntax. An example above is !book, but I also have !number and a few others, and various actions need to be performed based on the command type.

I am aware that I am missing the shebang line, but at the moment I am just running this script locally on my Windows machine and it's working as is, just not spitting out the results I want (It parses the first parameters, like "command=!book this is my test book !number 1222223 !book another book" will just split out "!book this is my test book", and ignore the rest.

What I would like to happen is to have the 'commands' pushed into an empty array, and use something such as Getopt::Param to parse them, or even getopt::long.

And as for why I am not using those to start with; I just wanted a simple way to do everything using one textarea and one param, and split it into multiples from that.

Thanks Monks, and apologies for the long winded first post!

Caleb

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