RE: Easy, elemental, but cool debug trick.

[Bourgeois_Rage]

Nice, I have similar techniques, but this one makes it real easy to clean up. I'll be sure to use this one. I think that if you write a short Perl program using REGEXP, you could scan through the document and remove all the lines with $DEBUG in it. That would seem to be the quickest way to clean up the file to me.

[mikfire]

Neat idea, but why remove them? I amlost always need to turn debugging back on sooner or later. How about something like this:

perl -i.bak -e 's/^(.+\$DEBUG.+)$/#$1/' foo.pl

to turn DEBUG off and then

perl -i.bak -e 's/^#(.+\$DEBUG.+)$/$1/' foo.pl

to turn it back on.

At which point, do we even need to define a variable? As a convention, any debug code would simply need #DEBUG hanging off the end and simply change the \$DEBUG part of the regex to look for #DEBUG.

Is it just me, or is there something very weird about using perl to preprocess perl?

This waste of time has been gratefully brought to you by
mikfire

[ZZamboni]

This is very neat. Going one step further, to allow debug blocks:

perl -pi.bak -e 's/^(.*)$/#$1/ if /\bDEBUG\b/../\bENDDEBUG\b/' foo.pl

to remove the block, and

perl -pi.bak -e 's/^#(.*)$/$1/ if /\bDEBUG\b/../\bENDDEBUG\b/' foo.pl

To reenable it. Then you can do something like this:

... code
# DEBUG
debug code
# ENDDEBUG
... more code

And yes, there is something very weird about using Perl to pre-process Perl...

--ZZamboni

[mikfire]

For the final interation, leave the DEBUG blocks always commented out. When you need to debug, simply try this:

perl -e 's/^#(.*)$/$1/ if /\bDEBUG\b/../\bENDDEBUG\b/' foo.pl | perl

and eliminate the intermediate file. Actually, more likely to reduce the odds I will ship code with the debug blocks still enabled :)

mikfire