Re: open() destroying my vars?

One issue that you should be aware of is that when opening a filehandle, you must use or die: $!. Also, if $basepath and $basename are different variables, there is some wierd stuff that goes on. I guess what is happening in that snippet is that Perl is being confused by you using 2 variables in that syntax and instance of using open. I walked over to another machine and threw together a little sumpthin' sumpthin' and the only thing that worked for me is catenating $basepath and $basename. So,

open HTML, ">$basepath/$basename.html";
[download]

Should be:

$foo = "$basepath"."$basename.html";

open HTML, ">foo" or die "Can't open $foo: $!";
[download]

Also make sure that if $basename is a HTML file, that the *value* of the variable has a suffix of '.html'.

redmist
redmist@users.sourceforge.net

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RE: Re: open() destroying my vars? by theorbtwo (Prior) on Jul 29, 2000 at 07:09 UTC
Thank you muchly, the script works perfectly now. The lines in question now read: `$filename = "$basepath/$basename.html"; open HTML, ">$filename" or die "Couldn't open $filename for output\n";` [download] However, I still don't know what's up with it not working in the first place. Do you know what the "wierd stuff" or the "confusion" is? It's nothing important; the script works and I should be able to give a bill to the customer tommorow, but I just don't like not knowning why my code didn't work.	[reply] [d/l]
RE: RE: Re: open() destroying my vars? by redmist (Deacon) on Jul 29, 2000 at 09:15 UTC
The pleasure is mine. As for the reason that it was acting funky, I don't know. I am not experienced or knowledgable enough to answer you without lying or misinforming. redmist redmist.dyndns.org redmist@users.sourceforge.net	[reply]
RE: Re: open() destroying my vars? by davorg (Chancellor) on Jul 30, 2000 at 15:48 UTC
My advice would be that you should always check the return value from an `open` call, but that `die` is not always the most appropriate response to a failure. Don't get me wrong - I'm sure that in 95% of cases (at least) is is the best action, but there are definitely times where alternative courses of action (log the error and move on, perhaps) would be more appropriate. -- <http://www.dave.org.uk> European Perl Conference - Sept 22/24 2000, ICA, London <http://www.yapc.org/Europe/>	[reply]
RE: Re: open() destroying my vars? by theorbtwo (Prior) on Jul 30, 2000 at 02:35 UTC
OK, I'm an idiot. I was looking at absolutly the wrong place. My code is perfect (fine, anyway), my datafile isn't. Specificly, it's missing data for the pictures I was acatualy looking at as test cases. They were at the top, so the debugging `print` appears to work fine -- the problem had scrolled off the top of the screen! Sorry guys, and thanks for the undeservied rep! <G> -- theorbtwo -- http://www.rtweb.net/theorb/	[reply] [d/l]