[Omaha.pm] Substitution loop

[Dan Linder]

Jay Hannah wrote:
> But what is a fatal "Substitution loop" error from Perl?
>
> I've never seen that one before. It disappeared without me changing  
> anything and I can't make it happen again.
>
> Probably user error.   :)
>   
 From "http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.8/pod/perldiag.pod":
Substitution loop : (P) The substitution was looping infinitely. 
(Obviously, a substitution shouldn't iterate more times than there are 
characters of input, which is what happened.) See the discussion of 
substitution in "Quote and Quote-like Operators" in perlop.

I can't see how the simple "$d1=~s/[^\d]//g;" could cause the loop as 
described above -- what happens if $d1 was all numbers - if there is a 
bug in the length check, then it could count X characters but try to run 
X+1 times and get that error...  (Just a shot in the dark, though.)

Do you have a way of catching the error next time and logging the 
initial contents of $d1?

Dan

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