Hello jamroll,

From the information given, the most likely explanation is that the hash entries $account{password} and $account{passwordagain} in create_account.pl are undefined. Add the following immediately before the call to $pb->generate:

{
    use Data::Dump;
    dd \%account;
}
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If that doesn’t identify the problem then, yes, you will need to post more code. However, you don’t need to post all of the code — just enough to provide an SSCCE.

Hope that helps,

okay. i removed the "sanitize" command from my get_params subroutine, and that fixed the issue. so, clearly "sanitize" is not doing what i hoped... I need to "sanitize" user input. so, in my "get_params_asHash" subroutine, I wrote:

  my %hash = map { split(m'='x, $_, 2) }
             grep { m'='x }
             split(m'&'x, get_params());
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get_params has:

my $query = join('&', map { $_ . '=' . sanitize($cgi->param($_)) } san
+itize($cgi->param()));
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and, finally, the sanitize code:

sub sanitize($) {
  #*
  # to remove HTML from a string
  #*
  my ($s) = @_; # a string of text
  my $rv = 0;

  if ($s) {
    my $nohtml = HTML::Restrict->new();
    my $processed = $nohtml->process($s);
    if ($processed ne $s) { $rv = $processed; } else { $rv = $s; }
  }

  return $rv;
  #usage: my $sanitized = sanitize($input);
}
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perhaps i'm going about "sanitizing" in "get_params" incorrectly?

I was pondering why the ball was getting bigger, and then...it hit me!

map { $_ . '=' . sanitize($cgi->param($_)) } sanitize($cgi->param())

Assuming the call to $cgi->param() returns a list¹, this list is first passed to sub sanitize which returns a scalar, so the input to map will only ever be a single value.

Actually, it gets worse. The $ prototype to sub sanitize coerces the argument list into a scalar, so if a list of, say, 3 values is passed in, $s will have the value 3!² Removing the prototype helps, but you still get only a single value. You need something like a second map:

map { $_ . '=' . sanitize($cgi->param{$_}) } map { sanitize($_) } $cgi
+->param()
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Also note that the $cgi->multi_param() method is preferred to the $cgi->param() method when a list is returned.³

And if the call to $cgi->param{$_} can itself return a list and not just a scalar, then yet another level of looping will be needed.

¹It may return a list or a scalar, depending on how the script was invoked. See “Fetching the names of all the parameters passed to your script” in CGI.
²See Far More Than Everything You've Ever Wanted to Know about Prototypes in Perl for the details.
³See the warning in “Fetching the value or values of a single named parameter” in CGI.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,