Re: Problem assigning values to Hash

[blokhead]

in reply to Problem assigning values to Hash

First of all, my congratulations for discovering Data::Dumper, you will never go anywhere without it ;)

This is a common problem with CGI's param method. It's being called in list context in this case. If the CGI form did not include a value for rs$i, then param("rs$i") in list context will return an empty list. The empty list just gets flattened away in a hash construction:

{
    number     => 1, 
    name       => "test", 
    id         => "test", 
    rollSizzle => (), 
    roll       => undef, 
    sizzle     => undef
}

## is the same as

{
    number     => 1, 
    name       => "test", 
    id         => "test", 
    rollSizzle => "roll",
    undef      => "sizzle",
    undef
}

This explains the output you're getting. You can fix it by forcing scalar context:

{ 
    number     => $number, 
    name       => scalar param("n$i"), 
    id         => scalar param("id$i"), 
    rollSizzle => scalar param("rs$i"), 
    roll       => $temp, 
    sizzle     => $temp
};

At some point, this problem has bitten everyone who's ever done CGI programming with CGI.pm, and I wish there were an option to pass to CGI.pm to force scalar context behavior for all calls to param. I rarely use forms where multiple fields are named the same, so param's list context is rarely useful for me...

Now that I think of it, I will probably start changing the tops of my CGI scripts from now on:

# use CGI 'param';
use CGI; sub param { scalar CGI::param(@_) }

[Steny]

Finally got it working. Thx a ton, guys! I really appreciate it.