# from the docs
use CGI ':cgi-lib';
my $params = Vars;
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Anyway, your while loop seems very unecessary. each returns a key-value pair - the value is already set in the ... value. You can always get that value with $Param{$key}. Why import into a package?

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

As discussed above making all of these values global is bad (they'll pollute your namespace and mean that I can send in whatever variables I like and perhaps mess up your script) and using a hash in a regular expression as you had planned to is easy enough.

So you might do this this way:

use CGI;
use strict;

my $query = CGI->new();
          # set up my defaults
my %parameters = (name => ["Anonymous"],
                  address => ["No fixed abode"],
                  phone => ["Not Available"]);

          # pull everything out of param and put in
          # my hash.
foreach my $key ($query->param())
{
        $parameters{$key} = [$query->param($key)];
}
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Note that if you're providing defaults, now is a good time to ensure you only get the parameters that you want, not all the ones that the user has given you. So change the foreach line to be:

foreach my $key (keys %defaults)
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Now, you wanted to be able to substitute these values into an SQL statement. Let's pretend that you've already made them untainted. Please untaint them. This substitution can be done like this:

          # then to do your substitution:
$SQLStatement =~ s/\$(\w+)/$parameters{$1}[0]/eg;
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A solution, depending on your table design and lots of other things might be to do the following:

foreach my $key (keys %defaults)
{
     foreach my $value (@$key)
     {
          $SQLStatement =~ s/\$(\w+)/$value/eg;
               # then use your $SQLStatement ....
     }
}
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Hope this helps.

jarich

Makeshifts last the longest.

  $SQLStatement =~ s/(\$\w+)/$1/eeg;
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Substituting with values from a hash is possible:

my %data = (
    foo => 'oof',
    bar => 'rab',
);

my $text = "foo/bar";
$text =~ s/(\w+)/$data{$1}/g;
print "($text)\n";
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