I would endorse all the advice given so far, especially demerphq's excellent points about getting rid of unnecessary repetitions of "if(...)" statements.

I would extend that sort of advice further, in general terms: whenever you find yourself re-typing (or copy/pasting) portions of code and/or large strings of quoted text, you almost certainly have a good opportunity for setting up a subroutine to parameterize a common operation, or a single scalar variable to hold a complicated string that will be used multiple times.

Even if a big string may be slightly different from one use to the next, it will be easier to have a single "template" string, with distinct placeholders where the variable parts can be substituted in when needed -- e.g. (not related to your app, but suggestive): 

$big_query = "select FIELDMATCH from foo where bar='baz' and ...";
...
($name_query = $big_query) =~ s/FIELDMATCH/name/;
...
($node_query = $big_query) =~ s/FIELDMATCH/node/;
...

[download]
(or, if each use of $big_query involves altering several portions of the text, make it a subroutine, with a hash of arrays to store the appropriate strings for each usage)

Basically, anything that's big or complicated -- and is needed more than once -- should only show up once in your code. This is one of the really crucial issues affecting how easy or hard it is to maintain/adapt/extend an application.

In reply to Re: Review of first real code by graff
in thread Review of first real code by SPIDEY

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