Perlscript ASP page responds strangely

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

I'm moving our company's ASP pages from VBS to Perlscript (for a variety of reasons, not all related to Perlscript's simpler interface for doing simple things and better overall power and compactness). Anyway, it seems to be ignoring my setting a variable's value. The code isn't extraordinarily long, so I'm posting all the relevant part here. In short, the $rtype variable, even though it seems to be "row", never gets to the elsif statement. Results can be seen at kbw.com. Forgive the current mess, I've put in a few statements to change the output so I could see what's going on. So far, it hasn't helped:

#First, set a bunch of semi-constants (apologies to those offended by 
+the lack of conventions here).

$tdo = "<td>";
$tdc = "<\/td>";
$tblo = "<table width=\"525\" border=\"0\" cellpadding=\"5\" cellspaci
+ng=\"0\">";
$hro = "<tr bgcolor=\"#0065ce\">";
$rc = "<\/tr>";
$ro = "<tr>";
$htd = "<td valign=\"top\"><b><font size=\"2\" color=\"white\" face=\"
+Arial,Helvetica,Geneva,Swiss,SunSans-Regular\">";
$htdc = "<\/font><\/b>".$tdc;

## Now the actual working code
$time=0;
$Response->write($tblo);    ## Write table (works)
$filename = $Server->MapPath('./data/test.dat'); ## map file
open(fileREAD, $filename); #open file (works)
while ($line = <fileREAD>){
$rtype = "";
@array = split "\t", $line;
$rtype = pop @array;
$time ++;
$Response->write("<tr><td>line = ".$line."&".$rtype."&".$time."<\/td><
+\/tr>"); ## t-shoot
#$Response->write("rtype = ".$rtype);
if ($rtype = "header "){
        $Response->write($hro);
        foreach (@array){
                #$Response->write("<tr><td>line = ".$line."&".$rtype."
+&".$time."<\/td><\/tr>");
                $Response->write($htd.$_.$rtype.$htdc);
                #$Response->write("<tr><td>line = ".$line."&".$rtype."
+&".$time."<\/td><\/tr>");
                }
        }
elsif ($rtype = "row "){
        $Response->write($ro);
        foreach (@array){
                $Response->write($td.$_.$tdc);
        }
        }
$Response->write($rc);
[download]

Any help appreciated Thanks Sam

Comment on Perlscript ASP page responds strangely Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Perlscript ASP page responds strangely by meetraz (Hermit) on Nov 11, 2003 at 23:38 UTC
In your if's and elsif's you are using the single "=" sign when you mean to use the double "==" sign. The single "=" is for setting a variable, while the "==" is for checking equality. In addition, when checking for string equality, you should use "eq" instad of "==". You probably got confused because VBscript uses "=" for everything.	[reply]
Re: Perlscript ASP page responds strangely by Roger (Parson) on Nov 11, 2003 at 23:56 UTC
moving our company's ASP pages from VBS to Perlscript Ah... A classic gotchya. `if ($rtype = "header ")` [download] should be changed to `if ($rtype eq "header ")` [download] instead. The '=' sign in the VB 'if' means equality test, but in Perl is an assignment. And also because you are comparing are two strings, you should use the 'eq' comparison keywords.	[reply] [d/l] [select]