Re^4: Need to turn off prints from module

[Mushka]

Thank you Ken! I thought of this workaround too, and it works marvelously for "[en]" issue, but those were not the only user agent strings that the module was notifying me about.

For example, string
Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+en-US;+rv:1.9.1.15)+Gecko/20101026+Firefox/3.5.15+(.NET+CLR+3.5.30729)
gives me a warning
Version string '20101026Firefox.0' contains invalid data; ignoring: '20101026Firefox.0' at /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8/Parse/HTTP/UserAgent.pm line 210, <FILES> line 26.

That's why i was asking a more global question how to "shut that module up". :o) I was thinking along the lines how you can say 2>&1 perhaps you could send all output from specified module to /dev/null... I would love to go into the module and tweak it, but i have read-only privileges, and i would try to avoid bothering the person who is responsible for installing these modules for me.

I was researching other user agent modules, but HTML::ParseBrowser thinks that mostly everything is Netscape (when it's clearly Firefox) and HTTP::BrowserDetect thinks that the only IE browser ppl are using is version 4.0 (and as someone said: No offence to that module's writer, but "Is this IE? Yay! Is this 7? Yay" is a bass-ackwards approach to how to detect useragents.)

[kcott]

For my tests, I used the problem string you posted then added three more from browsers I had handy on my PC. I notice that the Firefox one you've now posted has "+" characters in every position that mine has spaces (ignoring a few minor variations in version numbers). I took mine directly from the browsers; it occurred to me that may yours are perhaps URL-encoded (while you can represent a space as hex %20, it can also just be converted to a plus-sign).

So, I added your latest problem string to my existing test list and changed:

$useragent =~ s{ ( [+] ) [[] [^]]+ []] ( [+] ) }{$1$2}msx;

to just:

$useragent =~ y{+}{ };

And it all worked! :-)

$ ver_overload_prob.pl
UA: Mozilla/4.06+[en]+(WinNT;+I)
Netscape
4.060
Windows NT
UA: Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en) Presto/2.6.30 Version/10.61
Opera
10.610
Windows XP
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.4) Gecko/
[phone] Firefox/3.5.4
Firefox
3.005004
Windows XP
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.28
+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.2.2 Safari/525.28.1
Safari
3.002002
Windows XP
UA: Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+5.1;+en-US;+rv:1.9.1.15)+Gecko
+/20101026+Firefox/3.5.15+(.NET+CLR+3.5.30729)
Firefox
3.005015
Windows XP

So, give that a go - it might be the solution.

If not, you can redirect STDERR (see open - example code is about halfway down the page) but you'll lose every error message by doing that and I really wouldn't recommend it.

In the _numify() routine (referenced in my last post) pluses are actually removed (see final alternation item):

    $v    =~ s{
                pre      |
                rel      |
                alpha    |
                beta     |
                \-stable |
                gold     |
                [ab]\d+  |
                a\-XXXX  |
                \+
                }{}xmsig;

So, if my solution works, you might want to post a bug report with the fix being:

    $v    =~ y{+}{ };
    $v    =~ s{
                pre      |
                rel      |
                alpha    |
                beta     |
                \-stable |
                gold     |
                [ab]\d+  |
                a\-XXXX
                }{}xmsig;