[boulder.pm] ok, I've got a perl question

[Myke Komarnitsky]

This is more stylistic I think than syntactical.... but here goes.

Most of my perl work is for web sites - databases, forms, cgi, etc... often
of the time, inputted data is being put in a mysql database.  Thus, you have
to parse and prepare the user's data.

Silly and obvious question:  how do YOU go about getting the user data?

every perl example I see has the OO style, eg.
	use CGI;
	$cgi = new CGI;
	my $name = $cgi->param("name");
	my $email = $cgi->param("email");

which works, well, ok.  However, on one site, I have about 8 public forms
and 30 admin forms.  Typing all that explicitly is a pain in the ass, and
it's rife with opportunity to misspell a variable.


My way of getting the data is by using
	use CGI qw/:cgi-lib -no_debug/;
	&ReadParse;
which ends up giving me an %in hash with all the variables in there (eg.
$in{'name'},$in{'email'}, etc..).  Nice benefits:
	I can loop through that hash for security/data sanitization
	Escaping the data for 's for database input
	If I add another field in the form, I don't have to add another
	line to the perl script.
	Error logging: on an error, I do
	foreach $key (sort keys %in) { print "$key ==> $in{$key}\n";}
	which is handy for troubleshooting what your input data is.

I don't seem to ever run into other code that uses this method (an ancient
and unnamed local perl fanatic taught me this method, I must confess), so
I'm wondering if I'm missing something fantastically obvious.

Myke

Michael Komarnitsky      Komar Consulting Group
303.818.3718             http://www.komar.biz
http://climbingboulder.com
http://myke.komar.org
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