Re: Things every perl programmer should know?

[hardburn]

My CGIs have a set_params() subroutine which returns a hash of all the paramters I want (I used to set global variables, but I kicked myself of that habit). Orginally, I did this one param at a time:

sub set_params 
{
    use CGI qw(:standard);

    my %params;
    $params{param1} = param('param1') || '';
    $params{param2} = param('param2') || '';
    $params{param3} = param('param3') || '';

    # Dozen more lines of that

    return %params;
}

Now I keep a constant global array named @FIELDS which contains a list of all the fields I want and put them together with map:

my @FIELDS = qw(param1 param2 param3 . . . );

sub get_params 
{
    use CGI qw(:standard);
    return map { $_ => param("$_") || '' } @FIELDS;
}

You can remove the return in the above, but I kept it in this example for clarity.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated