One of my goals since coming to the Monastery is to write more efficient code, albeit, not necessarily more readible. My primary use of Perl is forms processing and dynamic web pages. Traditionally I have been using something like the following to read in my variables from an HTML form:
use strict;
use CGI;
my $q = new CGI;
    
my $name    = $q -> param('name');
my $address = $q -> param('address');
my $city    = $q -> param('city');
my $state   = $q -> param('state');
my $zip     = $q -> param('zip');
my $phone   = $q -> param('phone');
and so on....

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However, in reading my newly acquired Perl Cookbook about referencing and dereferencing, I found that I could do the same with:
use strict;
no strict 'refs';
use CGI qw(:standard);

my @params = param(); #get field names with empty params()

foreach my $field ( @params ) {        
    my $variable = $field;            
    $$variable = param( $field );    
}

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This apparently saves me the trouble of writing numberous lines of $variable = $q -> param('fieldname'); (some forms will have 20-30 fields) and also make edits easier.

So, fellow monks, any pitfalls or better ways of doing this?

Note: I switched from the OO syntax to the standard, even after reading ovid's great CGI tutorial and CGI Programming in Perl--it seems a toss-up, but I'm open.

Thanks!

In reply to More efficient reading of forms in CGI by bradcathey

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