Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm polling the user for a list of words separated by commas. The code is below. How can I check the input to make sure that it contains only letters and commas? 
print "Enter words separated by commas.";
my $answer=<STDIN>;

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•Re: Validating User Input
by merlyn (Sage) on Jun 10, 2002 at 15:51 UTC
    Well, it'll have a newline until you chomp it, so the answer is always "never". {grin} After chomping though: 
    print "Enter words separated by commas.";
chomp(my $answer=<STDIN>);
die "Invalid input" if $answer =~ tr/a-zA-Z,//c;

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    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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[d/l]
      Interesting, what occured to me first was /^[a-zA-Z,]+$/. However, I'm guessing there's a reason you used tr. Mind if I ask why?
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