(Of course, Oraperl is, more or less, backwards compatibility for perl 4 scripts. It's probably better to bite the bullet and move to DBI for new programs.)

Wow! So, if there are 300 rows each with only one element per and that particular column isn't indexed then potentially I could be doing 300 full table scans to get the information I want using Oraperl? That will take absolutely forever! Is using DBI going to alleviate that possibility?
How did people get along with this back in the day?!?! :)

----------
- Jim

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use DBI;
use Oraperl;
use Env;

my $DB = "DBNAME";
my $UN = "USERNAME";
my $PW = "PASSWORD";
my ($dbh,$sql,$c,$cursor,@MYARRAY,$numElements);

$dbh    = &ora_login($DB,$UN,$PW) or
              die("Oracle login FAILED.");

$sql    = "select distinct(clli) from gvc_traffic30";

$cursor = &ora_open($dbh,$sql) or die("Failed query (bad query?). $!\n
+");
@MYARRAY= &ora_fetch($cursor) or die("Failed to get return from query.
+ $!\n");

foreach my $clli ( @MYARRAY ) {
    chomp($clli);
    sleep(5);
    $c++;

    if ( /\W/ ) {
    print "Found bad character in line $c.";
    } else {
    print "This clli appears to be OK.";
    }
    print " : $clli\n";
}
[download]

Perhaps the Oraperl.pm is not widely used?

----------
- Jim

Just to illustrate I have rewritten your script to use DBI.
Note that I don't have access to Oracle so I haven't tested it.

The rewrite is quite simple:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use DBI;
use Env;

my $DB = "DBNAME";
my $UN = "USERNAME";
my $PW = "PASSWORD";
my ($dbh,$sth,$clli,$c);

$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oravel:$DB",$UN,$PW,
     {AutoCommit => 0, RaiseError => 1) or
              die("Oracle login FAILED, $DBI::errstr");

$sth = $dbh->prepare("select distinct(clli) from gvc_traffic30");
$sth->execute;

$sth->bind_col(1, \$clli);
while ($sth->fetchrow_arrayref ) {
    $c++;
    if ($clli =~ /\W/ ) {
      print "Found bad character in line $c.";
    } else {
      print "This clli appears to be OK.";
    }
    print " : $clli\n";
}
[download]

Note that I don't do any error checking. This is because I set $dbh->{RaiseError} in the connect call, so the DBI will do all neccessary errorchecking for me!

Check the DBI documentation to see what this does.

Happy DBI'ing

Aside from a couple of typos your code worked great. I appreciate it. Now I shall sit back and study it.

NOTE: Typos were on lines 12 & 13.

Im not sure if Oravel is what you wanted since I have not checked the DBI docs yet but I changed it to Oracle (knowing that that is a proper driver for DBI) and it worked
Original
$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oravel:$DB",$UN,$PW,
Changed
$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oracle:$DB",$UN,$PW,

This next one was simply a case of a missing bracket.
Original
(...{AutoCommit => 0, RaiseError => 1) or
Changed
(...{AutoCommit => 0, RaiseError => 1}) or

This is really great! Thanks for the example work.

----------
- Jim

Uhm, you're still not using DBI. This looks like oraperl or something similar. You can't miss DBI programs because right up at the top they say: use DBI;usually followed by something like: use DBD::Oracle;        # for exampleWithout knowing what ora_fetch does, it's pretty much impossible to say what may be going wrong.

It turns out that putting use DBD::Oracle at the top of the script is usually unnecessary. The DBI module will load the appropriate DBD module itself based on your connect string, e.g. $dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Oracle:$dbname", $user, $passwd);.

Although there's no harm in loading DBD::Oracle explicitly, you only really have to do it when you want to use Oracle's type constants: use DBD::Oracle qw(:ora_types);