Re: "Correct" program style questions

[adrianh]

The Once And Only Once bigot in me would force me to rewrite

my $_name     = param('name')    || '';
my $_color    = param( 'color' ) || '';

as

my ($_name, $_color) = map {param($_) || ''} qw(name color);

My illogical fear that there would be at least one person in the world called '0' would then force me to rewrite the above as:

my ($_name, $_color) = 
        map {defined($_) ? $_ : ''} map {param($_)} qw(name color);

As for the regex style... Personally I would go for traditional regexes if I was running a tutorial, since this is what most students would come across if they tried to follow up their perl work elsewhere. However that's just my preference - and depends on the audience and what they're expected to do with what their taught ;-)

I would also use the OO style of using CGI since I dislike namespace pollution - but that's just me.

I would also run encode_entities over $color as well as $name. I met a totally evil proxy a few years back that stripped HTML content to 7 bits and have been paranoid ever since!

AFAIK \p{IsAlpha} is exactly the same as using :alpha:.

(and are we ignoring uninitialised value warnings from the print if $name or $color don't match? :-)