1. Static Content Crawling: Static content are those which are generated once and doesn’t keeps on changing on their own, they need manual intervention and update to push any changes in content. So, such pages are easy to create but such pages are highly prone to security and their content can be crawled easily. So, in this case your crawler would be very efficient and providing accurate result as they simply have to access a page and get details.

2. Dynamic Content Crawling: Dynamic content are those which keeps changing dynamically, in this case page contains server-side code which allows the server to generate a unique content whenever the page is loaded. Since, these contents are dynamically generated using different technology hence they are very secure as well as very difficult to crawl. So, in this case the crawler creation would be very difficult and getting accurate data is also not possible as class names etc are generated on load and there is no html code available on page to get that. Hence, you may have to use different functionalities here such as using proxy or creating robot.txt.

my $mech = WWW::Mechanize->new();
my $response = $mech->get(URL);
 if ($response->is_success) {
        print $mech->content;
 }
 else {
     die $response->status_line;
 }
[download]

use WWW::mechanize::Firefox;
use Data::Dumper;
$mech= WWW::Mechanize::Firefox->new();

$mech->get(URL);

%arr_ref = (AL => [1795, 1276, 795, 1719, 1363, 1145, 961, 17, 18, 199
+5, 977, 1910, 1691, 21, 1660, 1768], 
AK => [1145, 961, 1995, 977, 1781, 1704], 
AZ => [1873, 872, 1145, 690, 1162, 961, 918, 528, 811, 704, 529, 1983,
+ 931, 40, 1995, 977, 597, 1157, 530, 598, 886, 782, 42, 691, 1945]);

foreach my $key (sort keys %arr_ref) {
    print "$key :: @{$arr_ref{$key}} \n";
    $mech->field( stateUSAId => $key );
    foreach  (@{$arr_ref{$key}}) {
            $mech->field(institutionUSAId=>$_);
            print $mech->content;
    }

}
[download]

I'm currently working on a module which uses Tkx. I came across something tricky involving appending bindings. It took a while to work out and, in the process, I ran a lot of tests: the results were quite surprising. I've posted this here in case anyone else finds themselves in a similar position: hopefully, it might save them some time and effort.

Tkx is a thin wrapper around Tcl. Its documentation is minimal: it just links to the Tcl documentation and leaves you to work out how to use it. In this instance, I was looking at the bind command documentation for information on appending a binding. I've linked to all of it, here's the relevant parts for this specific post:

NAME

bind — Arrange for X events to invoke Tcl scripts

SYNOPSIS

bind tag ?sequence? ?+??script?

INTRODUCTION

... If script is prefixed with a "+", then it is appended to any existing binding for sequence; ...

That's all it says about appending bindings. I investigated this; ran some tests; and was somewhat surprised at the outcome. The module I'm currently working on now contains this documentation:

Appending Bindings

When appending bindings, using the ?+??script? format, the plus (+) isn't a separate argument. Any of the following syntax variations are valid (subname works for normal named subroutines as well as lexical subroutines).

See Update below.

    '+' . sub { ... }
    '+' . \&subname
    '+' . [\&subname]
    '+' . [\&subname, @args]
    ['+' . \&subname]
    ['+' . \&subname, @args]
    '+' . $coderef
    '+' . [$coderef]
    '+' . [$coderef, @args]
    ['+' . $coderef]
    ['+' . $coderef, @args]
[download]

The surprising part was all the different ways of concatenating a string ('+') with an anonymous coderef, a named coderef, and an anonymous arrayref, without the code blowing up in my face.

This may also be useful to those using related modules, like Tcl::Tk and Tcl::pTk; although, I could be completely wrong on that (I have little knowledge of these beyond knowing of their existence).

Update: Despite successfully running two dozen or so tests on all those syntax formats, none of them appear to be actually functional. My apologies to anyone who's been trying to get them to work.

I've spent a bit of time looking into this. I can append one binding using either

... '+' . Tkx::i::interp->create_tcl_sub( CODEREF ) ...
[download]

or

my $interp = Tkx::i::interp();
... '+' . $interp->create_tcl_sub( CODEREF ) ...
[download]

And that works for CODEREF as any of these three:

sub { ... }
\&subname
$coderef
[download]

However, whenever I attempt to append a second (or third) binding, none of the appended bindings work; although, the original binding works as expected. The only feedback I get looks like the following (there's no line numbers or other useful information):

Error: invalid command name "::perl::CODE(0x7ffef5dd34d8)"
[download]

So again, my apologies to anyone who rushed off to try what I originally posted. I will spend some more time on this: I'll let you know if that proves fruitful.

Do you use spaces or tabs in your code for indentation?

Apparently, StackOverflow says you get paid better for spaces than tabs!

(I'm not sure whether to take this seriously or not, or, if serious, how much salt to consume simultaneously...)

Me, I just let my editor do my indenting for me, and it produces spaces, so I'm good. :)

In reviewing recently reaped nodes, I see a disturbing trend.

I know many of you detest one particular Monk's posts, so badly that you'll downvote them just because it was he who posted them. And at least one of you has already indicated that you'll always vote Reap on anything of his that gets Considered.

I would encourage my fellow Monks to re-read How do I use the power of consideration responsibly?; it is still considered Required Reading in Nodes to consider. Notably, disagreeing with content or style is not supposed to be a reason to Consider.

The war against one Monk's perceived incompetence seemed childish when it amounted merely to downvotes and snide comments. Now we're moving solidly into cyberbullying and censorship.

I find this terribly inconsistent with the spirit of the Monastery.

Surely we are better than this...

Wir hören von einer besondern Einrichtung bei der englischen Marine. Sämtliche Tauwerke der königlichen Flotte, vom stärksten bis zum schwächsten, sind dergestalt gesponnen, daß ein roter Faden durch das Ganze durchgeht, den man nicht herauswinden kann, ohne alles aufzulösen, und woran auch die kleinsten Stücke kenntlich sind, daß sie der Krone gehören.
Ebenso zieht sich durch Ottiliens Tagebuch ein Faden der Neigung und Anhänglichkeit, der alles verbindet und das Ganze bezeichnet.
----
There is, we are told, a curious contrivance in the service of the English marine.
The ropes in use in the royal navy, from the largest to the smallest, are so twisted that a red thread runs through them from end to end, which cannot be extracted without undoing the whole; and by which the smallest pieces may be recognized as belonging to the crown.
Similarly a thread of attachment and affection is woven into Ottilie’s diary which connects it all together, and characterizes the whole


Goethe, Elective Affinities, part two, chapter two

Dedicated to my 15th anniversary at perlmonks (Happy Monkday!!1! You've been here 15 distressing years. Has it really been that long?), but also to monks who forgot to celebrate their anniversary here; to all my firends at the monastery old and new ones!

Indeed 5 years (one lustro in eatalien, a word with no translation) are passed since Ten (years) Here. The fact you dont know is that i have spent 1/3 of my life lurking here; no regrets!

Sincerely perlmonks is still my only online community, as Perl is my only programing language: machines are invading our lives: Perl let me to exercitate my will against them. I know i loose a lot knowing only Perl and not many other interesting technologies, but I have also some real life to attend..

Can you guess what Perl level i reached after 15 years? I just completed the basics! It is true that ten years are the minimum to achieve a good degree at something. I needed even more because of my classical education and my partime employement (or maybe I'm a bit dumb as my TERM %ENV var.. ).

Infact I have a lot more to learn and to practice: module creation and testing being on top of the list. Not because I have something important to share in CPAN, but principally because abstracting behaviours to modules is the only easy way I found to test. And good tests are the headcorner stone of any solid building. Web developping with modern Perl tecniques follow very near in the list. Parallel programming and hardware interaction follow as well.

Perl help me a lot during my daily tasks. I'm a lazy (in a Perl sense..) sysadmin forced by the market to have $^O matching 2 ** 5 most of the times; I use Perl as soon as I can, many times in the darkness of my desktop, just showing results. I activate, fix, automate, report, communicate, summarize, show, backup, retrieve.. using Perl, peppering with some fun a (permit me to say) boring job.

Utterly astonished by the knoweledge and altruism of many monks here at the monastery I find everyday something interesting to learn or to bookmark in my cell for further investigation. Some good old monk is returned after years to perlmonks, for my joy, and some new, very skilled ones have joined recently. I've learn what to pick and what to discard and every progress I made in my Perl skill is due to this community.

Let me say that, as five years ago, I still own and ride my wonderful Kawasaki GPZ motorcycles, I still have the same wife (even if motorcycles are easier to handle). I plan to repaint both when I have some money to spend (motorcycles not wife!).

Using Perl to solve my dilemmas and to expand my action field let me feel the same thrill for the challenge as fifteen years ago. I have some math fascination (having no math background at all) for Tartaglia's (well Pascal's) triangle and for numeric series and some interest in photo manipulation with surprising (to me!) good results: I put them on github and I'll put some other decent old project and new things in the future.

Serving here at the monastery, helping when I can (and when powerful monks are distracted) is a pleasure and a privilege. Again everything I know in Perl, every progress I made is a gift from perlmonks and the Perl community in general. CPAN is a big sea full of treasures and syrens (even dangers for the unwares) and is worth the navigation: I see there many different way to approach problems, wrong and unmaintained attempts, state of the art by genial ones.

15th anniversary! I'm still a teenager in Perl programming. As every teenager I have dreams and some destructive luddite will as well: oneliners and evil evals comes from this part of my brains. But sometimes I gave some very wise answer as well. It happens.

At nigth sometimes I find myself lurking into longtime abandoned cells of monks of the past: you can find there funny nodes and precious insights. Byfar better than watching tv! Surprisingly most of such content is still modern and valuable even after many release of Perl. I suspect I started with 5.6 or 5.8 and I'm still alive during 5.26 days. Looking backward and forward too: (?<=pm) and (?=pm)

Time is money and this post is already too long, so just some final words:

Perl and Perlmonks forever!

Many thanks to perlmonks community for this fun and profiting time and take, as souvenir of the party, a little toy by my part!

L*

Following on from Working Solo and in a Team, this meditation focuses on conflict in teams.

Vulnerability and Trust

I'm a genius and always the smartest person in the room. I also am the greatest expert on every topic ever as soon as I've thought about it for at least five seconds, none of my subordinates could possible know more about anything than me so I should always be micromanaging them and telling them exactly what to do in every situation, and if you think what I said blatantly makes no sense that's just because you are so simple compared to my vast intellect. Well, if we failed in our goals it's obviously the fault of all my various subordinates and not me, because after all, I'm awesome!

-- perldigious describes a dysfunctional manager he once worked for

Vulnerability and trust are crucial to good teamwork. Everyone in the team needs to be vulnerable. Everyone. To freely admit: "I don't know the answer", "I need help", "I stuffed up, sorry". Sadly, just one team member with a toxic attitude, like perldigious's dysfunctional manager above, destroys teamwork.

Reinforcing points made in Psychological Safety, Patrick Lencioni, in a talk on Team Dysfunctions, gives some real-world examples of teams becoming dysfunctional when just one team member could not be vulnerable. And it's worst of all when that one non-vulnerable team member happens to be the team leader.

How to get everyone in the team to be vulnerable and acknowledge their weaknesses? According to Patrick, there is only one way: The leader must go first!

Why is vulnerability and trust so important?

Conflict

Without trust, conflict is politics. With trust, conflict is the pursuit of truth.

-- Patrick Lencioni in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Conflict is normal. Conflict is expected. Part of the human condition. Handling conflict effectively is the primary reason why trust is so important in teams. Without trust, conflict tends to become personal or political; with trust, conflict is the pursuit of truth, finding the best solution.

It's vital for the team to not hold back, to disagree passionately when required. To be honest to each other. And respectful. Is arguing a "waste of time"? No! No argument means no commitment! Of course, the arguments must be focused on finding the best solution, never personal or political.

Disagree and Commit

Intel has a saying: Disagree and Commit. Curiously, without disagreement it's difficult to get commitment and cohesion. In general, when people have a chance to express their point of view and have its pros and cons heard and appreciated, they are more likely to accept and support a differing approach.

In contrast, conflict that persists after the group has made a well-examined decision is often harmful. At a certain point in a project, the potential benefit of changing approaches is less than the disruption caused by changing direction. At that stage, commitment is required. Early disagreement is welcome, but then the team must unite behind a shared goal.

-- Disagree and Commit: The Risk of Conflict to Teams

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit. Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

-- Amazon 13th Principle

Though Intel and Amazon share the same "Disagree and Commit" slogan, they appear to have a different emphasis. Intel emphasize teamwork and cohesion (when people have a chance to express their point of view and have its pros and cons heard and appreciated, they are more likely to accept and support a differing approach) while Amazon focus on faster decision making ("I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?") and innovation (for more innovation, you need disagreement, not consensus).

Accountability

Peer-to-peer accountability is the best kind of accountability. When people don't commit, they don't hold each other accountable. Leaders must be willing to hold people accountable, not just on quantitative issues (KPIs), but behavioral ones too.

References

• Working Solo and in a Team
• Psychological Safety
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni (youtube)
• Disagree and Commit (Amazon blog)
• How to handle conflict: Disagree and Commit (Jeff Bezos)
• Jeff Bezos Letter to Shareholders (Disagree and Commit)
• Amazon 13th Principle
• Disagree and Commit: The Risk of Conflict to Teams (Intel)

As some of you may know, I am trying to become a better Perl writer. Part if it is finding where I wrote something that can be done better by someone else and using the better way.

One time I needed to do a numeric comparison of months written as text. So I wrote a module to get the munth numbers needed. After I wrote it, I found to my dismay, I had not needed to write it. Date::Calc had a subroutine called Decode_Month that was much better than what I wrote. I am so embarrassed I did not think to look in Date::Calc first before I wrote my silly little module. Date::Calc is far better at date manipulation than anything I could write. So, I dropped the use of my module for Date::Calc. It was a learning experience I took forward to the rest of my code.

Another part of becoming better is rewriting and renaming the modules I have written. To find names for my modules, I have been crawling CPAN to find what name spaces already exist.

I was looking for a new name for my Util::Number module. I crawled CPAN and found "Number" is a top name space. Then I found Number::Format. I sighed thinking my little Util::Number's days were numbered. Number::Format has a subroutine called round and so did Util::Number. Both do the same thing. Number::Format has a subroutine called format_number that puts commas in numbers and rounds numbers together, just like commify and my pretty_number. I thought commify and pretty_number were not going to be able to match format_number's power.

So, I installed Number::Format and was going to discontinue using my Util::Number. Why? Using Number::Format in code that I need help with, you can install it from CPAN without any trouble. Using Util::Number in code that I need help with, you would have to guess at what it does unless I also put Util::Number in the node with my problem code.

So, I was changing over my code from pretty_number to format_number and making sure it returned what I wanted. Then I got a big surprise. format_number has limitations commify and pretty_number do not have. format_number can not put commas into very big numbers. It outputs an error about the big number and suggests using Math::BigFloat.

format_number

perl -e 'use Number::Format qw(format_number); print format_number(123
+45678987654321)."\n";'
[download]

returns...

round() overflow. Try smaller precision or use Math::BigFloat at -e li
+ne 1.
[download]

commify

perl -e 'use Util::Number qw(commify); print commify(12345678987654321
+)."\n";'
[download]

returns...

12,345,678,987,654,321
[download]

In the change over from commify and pretty_number to format_number, I got another surprise. format_number does not do ordinal numbers either. I fed it an ordianal number in Happy unbirthday redux! and other birthday stuff, and it returned the following error.

Argument "16725th" isn't numeric in numeric comparison (<=>) at /home/
+me/perl5/lib/perl5/Number/Format.pm line 599.
[download]

So, I went back to commify in my code and got...

Happy 16,725th unbirthday, Aleena! You have 32 days until your next bi
+rthday on July 10, 2017.
[download]

This was all so surprising to me. Here I was ready to use a module readily available on CPAN instead of my own silly little module, but the CPAN module could not do what mine does. I was thinking "But it's is so much better than mine. It's got all those bells and whistles. And it's on CPAN!"

This is not a rant against Number::Format. It is on CPAN and is better written than my little Util::Number. I will use Number::Format in code when I need help. Number::Format also has options I do not currently have, so I will be using it whenever one of those options is needed. Util::Number may become a fallback module when Number::Format will not work for what I am doing currently. Util::Number will not be going to CPAN since I did not write commify or round, I just put them together in pretty_number.

Util::Number

I am trying to make my modules more useful with better names and code. I am also trying to get better by using what is already available. However, sometimes, what is available is a little less than what is wanted. That does not mean I will stop searching.

Afterward...

I cracked opened my now disused month module just to look at it. Then I saw the hash of arrays. What do I do with hashes of arrays of similar data? I randomize it of course. So my Util::MonthNumber is now Random::Month... 8)

Random::Month

My speculation is it's caused by some changes to CPAN and its infrastructure at the Perl Toolchain Summit this May.

Does anyone have any idea whom to ask?

See Re: VERSION section in POD for a previous mention of the shields in the Monastery.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
[download]

Just a little rant ...

I came home quite late, after a long day. Some excavator or a poor guy with a spade has cut a major power line. The power network company has fixed that, at least provisionally, so power was already back when I came home. What could be wrong?

The microwave oven happily told me it was 7:15 am. Oh well. Press the clock button. Oops, that was the timer, better press the other button with a very similar clock symbol. "12h" on the display. No, I'm in Europe, I want 24 h. Turn the wheel button. Wrong. Now I'm adjusting hours in the 12 h system. Press the clock button a few more times, jumping past minutes, back to "12h", then to "24h", then again minutes. Oops. Well, give the clock button a few more cycles. "24h". Yes! Now, rotate the wheel button. "1:", "2:", "3:", ..., "11:". Ok, turn it in reverse: "10:", "9:", ... "23:". OK. Push the wheel button. "BEEEP! Stupid user!". Oops. Push the clock button again. I wonder how many push cycles are left. Adjust the minutes. ":00", ":01", ... ":23". Push the wheel - no "BEEEP!" - ok, I'm tired. Press the clock button once more. Done.

Home office ISDN system phone: It displays its name and its firmware version. WTF? Maybe power did not come back cleanly? Unplug the combined ISDN and power jack, and fiddle it back in. Nope, does not help. Load the configuration program, adjust a minor setting, write back the configuration, to clean up NVRAM / EEPROM. Also does not help. Maybe the PBX lost its clock? Sure it did. It has no RTC, or at least no battery backup. But thanks to ISDN, it will adjust its clock when I call some external number and establish a connection with someone else. So I called a free hotline, and waited for their answering system. Yepp, it talks to me. Hung up. The PBX should now have adjusted its clock. But wait: The stupid phone still shows name and version, not date and time. Well, let's flash the firmware. It's just a few more mouse clicks. "Firmware is already at 2.3e. Do you still want to update the firmware?" Sure. About a minute later, the phone goes through a little disco mode, slowly flashing almost all LEDs, then comes back with name and version, and is still stuck there. Grrrrrrr! Where is my password for the support forum? It must be something simple. RTFM before posting nonsense. Yeah, right: That stupid phone refuses to switch to date and time until it has fetched the current date and time from the PBX. And the PBX does not have current date and time, despide having made a successful external call. Did some internal calls from and to the office phone. No help. So, dig through the three manuals of the PBX, and yes, there is a way to adjust the PBX's clock manually. Just dial a magic 20+ digit code, put in date and time at the right positions, and it will adjust its clock. So, let's start. Error at the fifth digit or so, PBX beeps "STUPID USER" and refuses any more configuration until I hang up. But hey, I've a smart office phone, I'll enter the magic code before picking up the handset, as I can correct errors there. Well, nice idea, but the phone dials dumb, whereas the PBX expects some delays in the code. Again, it beeps "STUPID USER" and expects me to hang up. And lo and behold, somehow the phone has managed to get date and time from the uncooperative PBX and shows date and time instead of name and version, as if nothing has happened. Why doesn't that *$%§%! phone simply display "Date and time not set in PBX"? And why doesn't that PBX contain a sub-1$ RTC chip and a similarily cheap CR2032?

Answering machine. No. Not today. It has a display. It blinks "St" = Stellen (adjust time). It has << (rewind) and >> (forward) buttons, and it has + and - buttons. And a set button. + and - do not work for adjusting time, you have to use << and >>. OK, but that stupid machine insists on speaking every single number. "Adjusting time. [Silence] 1 hour. [Silence] 2 hours. [Silence] 3 hours." It's 23:45 or so. Holding down the buttons changes the increment from 1 to 5 after some ages. After some more ages, about at sunrise, I would be finished. No, it will have to wait.

Other mains-powered clocks have adjusted fine, thanks to DCF77. The clocks in my sat receivers have automatically adjusted to the time broadcasted via satellite. No problem.

Computers, including firewall? All fine. A nice reboot mail from the server, all subsystems happy, VMs have stopped. Push a few start buttons, and they all come back. No problems. Perhaps I should automate the VM startup, too. But then again, the uptime of the server is usually in the range of 100 to 300 days, interrupted only by hardware upgrades or mans with spades. I don't really have to automate, but I could. Maybe someday. RTCs on PC systems have a battery backup. I think the firewall does not, but as all my systems, it adjusts via NTP thanks to pool.ntp.org.

It seems that today is the official bad user interface day:

At work, a client wants another prompt for the user interface of the product we've developed. Currently, to switch from simple mode to advanced mode, you have to press the "settings" button, then either enter a code or at least confirm that you are qualified for advanced mode, and then you have to press yet another button to stay in advanced mode. Now, when you press the "settings" button, you first shall have to confirm that you really wanted to press the "settings" button. Aaaaaah!

OK, to be fair, at the same time, the last button press to stay in advance mode should no longer be required. But still: How often should a user confirm a completely harmless switch from simple to advanced mode? Should the product prompt for social security number of the user and his manager and five fingerprints from each of the two before switching modes?

And I won't write any more about Qt, QML and the state of its documentation than PITA. Or perhaps just a few sentences more. When do people learn that documentation is the most important part of software? Code examples are good, they can avoid a lot of prose. But examples are stupid if they show only the documented detail, stripped from all required surroundings. How do I use a complex object that requires a lot of setup? Like this:

  simpleObject {
      id: "foo"
      magicStuff: complexObject {
          id: "bar"
          ...          //<-- literally! All setup omitted from the exa
+mple.
      }
  }
[download]

And not a line more. All setup omitted, you are expected to guess what you may need to set up, and how. You have to dig through the inheritance, and hope for some clues in an unrelated part of the documentation. Or you have to search for the source code. Trace the source code. Find out what hapens in the complex object, and what it expects to have been set up. "If it was easy to use our code, you wouldn't get paid so much!"

Documentation is the user interface to 3rd party code, and in case of Qt/QML, it sucks. Yes, there is worse documentation. But I spend half a day digging through heaps of this crap and did not get one step further.

Alexander

I imagine many of us have been irritated by the increase in lame questions from Clueless Newbs attempting to get their homework done for free. Well, according to the New York Times, there's a plagiarism plague:

( See "As Computer Coding Classes Swell, So Does Plagiarism", NYT 2017-05-29 )

So the next time you are about to jump in and answer a Clueless Newb's question because it will show off your skillz, consider choosing the admittedly less satisfying option and point them instead to beginners' doc. You will be better serving not only the questioner, but also Truth and Justice.

So, I don't use CGI a lot much these days. But I recently wrote a little joke module and decided to make a little HTML form interface for it. Plack would be a sensible way of doing the interface, but this was just a silly little thing and I was feeling lazy, so I coded it up using CGI instead. I'd used Moo rather than Moose so speed shouldn't have been an issue.

I uploaded it to the server and visited the page and it just showed me my Perl source code. Hmmm…

Create .htacccess and add the following lines:

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .pl
[download]

Visit the page again… still showing the source code. Hmmm…

Scratch head for five minutes. Open up httpd.conf, add:

<Directory /path/to/my/vhost/>
  AllowOverride all
</Directory>
[download]

Visit the page again… still showing the source code. Hmmm…

SSH into the server and run ./myscript.cgi from the command line.

"uniq" is not exported by the List::Util module
[download]

Okay, I must have an old version of it. Upgrade.

Visit the page again… still showing the source code. Hmmm…

Stop using List::Util entirely.

sub uniq {
  my %seen;
  grep !$seen{$_}++, @_;
}
[download]

Visit the page again… still showing the source code. Hmmm…

Scratch head for ten minutes. Rename to ./myscript.pl.

Visit the page again… still showing the source code. Hmmm…

Create the following file and mark it as executable:

#!/bin/sh
echo "Content-Type: text/plain";
echo "";
echo "Hello world";
[download]

Visit my new page… also showing the source code. Hmmm…

Scratch head some more.

Consider buying anti-headlice shampoo.

Finally… FINALLY… after about TWO HOURS I figure out the problem! It was…

what are the fundamental obstacles hindering Perl to be used instead of Bash and or PowerShell?

For instance I'm aware of easy piping with | and redirection >

but this could be handled by reversing the direction and aliasing some builtin commands to Perl subs

for instance ls | grep '.txt'|less could easily be less grep {/.txt/} ls

with less and ls implemented as subs (see also Shell )

What else?

Insights?

°) see also Shell and aliases in perldebug like | for paging

Hello dear esteemed monks,

More than once I felt an urge to insert a set of Test::More's checks into my application code, for instance when loading a plug-in or validating a complex piece of data. However, Test::More/Test::Builder is best suited to only run inside test scripts.

So I came up with a module to fill the gap. And I'm going to release it to CPAN soon, unless some huge problem is detected.

The idea is as follows:

• A contract is an object representing a series of checks/assertions. It has some control methods as well as the checks themselves. A counterpart method exists for every of Test::More's checks.
• The most basic check is refute($condition, $message) which may be viewed as an inverted ok(). It is assumed that a passing test does not need attention, while a failing one begs for an explanation.
• New checks may be added quite easily, appearing as both contract's methods and individual functions that run just fine under Test::More.
• And these checks can be tested (who shaves the barber?) fairly easily using the contract_is ($contract, "11000101") assertion.
• Prototyped exception-proof contract { BLOCK; } sugar exists to reduce the bolierplate. Such blocks may be nested.

What usage I can see this far:

• loading user-supplied code;
• validating complex pieces of data;
• checking that multiple implementations (XS vs PP, different backends etc) behave exactly the same;
• maybe some use exists for development using traits/mixins (aka Moose::Role);
• maybe some assertion modules may be armed with a refute($what_went_wrong, $why_we_care) call.

Some details (this is basically a copy-and-paste of the project's README):

CONCLUSION

As stated above, this module is going to be released to CPAN, but maybe I'm missing something very obvious here...

My previous submission on the topic: RFC: Test::Refute - extensible unified assertion & testing tool.

The project link again: https://github.com/dallaylaen/perl-test-contract.

Thank you, and hope you enjoyed the reading!

Over the last few days, I've been doing a project that is forcing me take a new harder look at everything I've written: code and markup. One of the items which came up in my audit was a little subroutine which takes a number (usually scalar(@list)) and returns how many columns the list would be in according to exponential calculations. The default behavior of this subroutine is to return a word number not an integer. When I looked at it again, a voice in the back of my head told me the subroutine should return the integer by default because integers are more useful. I also had the sinking feeling someone here probably pointed that out to me, and I ignored it. I wanted what I wanted, and no one was going to make me change my mind at the time. I had to change my own mind and pay the price for it later.

So, this is my confession. I am a doofus. I am hard headed and obstinate when it comes to attaining my short term goals. I crawled into my shell to avoid any good advice about coding for the future.

So here is my old sub...

use Lingua::EN::Inflect qw(NUMWORDS);

sub get_columns {
  my ($max_cols, $amount, $number) = @_;
  if ($amount <= $max_cols ** 2) {
    for my $num (1..$max_cols) {
      if ($amount >= $num ** 2 && $amount < ($num + 1) ** 2) {
        return $number && $number =~ /^[yt1]/ ? $num : NUMWORDS($num);
      }
    }
  }
  else {
    return $number && $number =~ /^[yt1]/ ? $max_cols : NUMWORDS($max_
+cols);
  }
}
[download]

And the new more useful sub...

use Lingua::EN::Inflect qw(NUMWORDS);

sub get_columns {
  my ($max_cols, $amount, $word) = @_;
  if ($amount <= $max_cols ** 2) {
    for my $num (1..$max_cols) {
      if ($amount >= $num ** 2 && $amount < ($num + 1) ** 2) {
        return $word && $word =~ /^[yt1]/ ? NUMWORDS($num) : $num;
               ############################################# Delete to
+ get rid of Lingua::EN::Inflect
      }
    }
  }
  else {
    return $word && $word =~ /^[yt1]/ ? $NUMWORDS($max_cols) : $max_co
+ls;
           ################################################### Delete 
+to get rid of Lingua::EN::Inflect
  }
}
[download]

I feel bad for only now realizing returning a integer by default would be more useful than returning a number word. I think I spoke aloud when I called myself a doofus for returning a number word by default.

I've been doing a lot of rethinks lately. Some of my "utility" scripts seem useless in a broader sense.

The great advice I got from Monks long ago is finally settling into my head. I hope I am better with future advice, but that is to be seen.

The thread "Randomly reassign hash keys" got me thinking about this one. The values doc says:

Note that the values are not copied, which means modifying them will modify the contents of the hash.

This means that $_++ for values %hash; will modify the original hash values, and the following (based on this AM post) will assign to the values of the hash:

sub { @_[0..$#_] = qw/r s t/ }->(values %hash);
[download]

The above work because both the foreach loop variable and the elements of @_ are aliases to the original scalars. The slice in the second example is necessary, since @_ = ... would clobber the array and remove the aliasing, instead of assigning to its elements.

However, values itself is not lvalue, meaning that values(%hash) = qw/a b c/; won't work. Neither will (values(%hash))[0] = 'a';.

Here's my "invention", which I present as a curiosity rather than a suggested solution. It makes use of Lvalue subroutines and Prototypes. The parens on the left are necessary for the sub to be called in list context.

sub lvalues (\%) : lvalue { values %{$_[0]} }
(lvalues %hash) = qw/i j k/;  # works!
[download]

Since the order of the values returned by values is random, this probably isn't particularly useful other than in the context of the thread I mentioned above:

(lvalues %hash) = shuffle values %hash;
[download]

Updates 1&2: However, note that repeated calls to (lvalues %hash) = values %hash; will only "randomize" the values once, and on older Perls the order won't be very "random" at all apparently not randomize at all, I would guess because the order of the returned values is not randomized between the calls to values. Some interesting reading on the topic: Re^2: setting PERL_PERTURB_KEYS & PERL_HASH_SEED in a perl file and Re^2: Curious: are anon-hashes in random order?

Minor updates for clarification.