Re^2: how to assign hash element value to scalar?

[jugdish114]

thanks, yes this is part of a subroutine, here's the beginning of it:

sub enter_order {

  my ($userid) = $_[0];
  my ($password) = $_[1];
  my ($projectid) = $_[2];
  my ($ordertypeid) = $_[3];
  my ($orderdateid) = $_[4];
  my ($accountid) = $_[5];
  my ($segcodeid) = $_[6];
  my ($marketid) = $_[7];
  my ($marketday) = $_[8];
  my ($marketmonth) = $_[9];
  my ($marketyear) = $_[10];
  my ($putcall) = $_[11];
  my ($strikeprice) = $_[12];
  my ($bs) = $_[13];
  my ($quantity) = $_[14];
  my ($orderprice) = $_[15];
  my ($entered_by) = $_[16];

yes, when i add 'use strict' it is not very pretty, some of the code outside the subroutine give errors.

and thanks for pointing out the error with the "==" rather than "eq" i think i write in too many languages to keep them straight.

see ya,

[liverpole]

    when i add 'use strict' it is not very pretty, some of the code outside the subroutine give errors.

You don't really believe that by not adding 'use strict' it means the errors magically go away, do you? :-)

[jugdish114]

Ok, Ok, Liverpole wins, it was his gently embarassing remarks that got me to clean up the error when 'use strict' was added back in the code. Once I worked through all the global and local referencing, the code behaved pretty well. So my syntax was correct, it seems that Perl was getting confused somewhere because of lack of variable definition.

Looks good, thanks again
fc

[Hofmator]

Well, as an aside ... if you pass that many parameters to a subroutine, have you considered using a hash and using name => value pairs? That would greatly reduce the risk of errors and makes all these variable declarations unnecessary ...

I was thinking of something like the following ... suitably adjusted to your concrete requirements of course (are all parameters necessary, should they get a default value if not given, ...)

# call the sub
my_sub(userid => 'foo', password => 'bar');

sub my_sub {
  my %default_values = (userid => 'user', password => 'passwd');

  my %param = (%default_values, @_);

  print $param{userid}, $/;
  print $param{password}, $/;
  # ...
}

# or with all required arguments
sub my_sub {
  my @required = qw/userid password/;
  my %param = @_;

  for my $req (@required) {
    die "Subroutine my_sub called without required parameter: $req"
      unless exists $param{$req};
  }

  print $param{userid}, $/;
  print $param{password}, $/;
  # ...
}

[johngg]

It may be that you want to explicitly show which element of the subroutine's arguments is assigned to which variable but if not, you could save some typing by doing

my ($userid, $password, $projectid, ... , $entered_by) = @_;

I hope this is of use.

Cheers,

JohnGG