I've written a custom form class to handle making & validating forms.

usage:
my $form = new FormObject( $ref2QuestionsHash, $ref2QuestionsOrderArra
+y );
$form->printForm;
$form->validate($ref2UserInput)

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i'm working out the validation of select boxes right now -- I want only the selectbox options to be valid.

Options are assigned to a selectbox using an array of value/text pairs as follows: 
'data' =>    [
            ['m','male'],
            ['f','female'],
        ],

[download]
That would result in html of : _option value="m"_ male _/option_ -- and an f/female

Validating this, right now, happens as follows:
my $valid = 0;
for (my $i=0; $i<=$#{$question->{'data'}};$i++){
    if ( $answer eq ${$question->{'data'}}[$i][0] ) {
        $valid = 1;
        last;
    }
}

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So, my question is - anyone have a better idea? The only other option I considered was creating a hash of acceptable answers and checking existance -- but to accomplish that I'd either have to pre-compute the hash keys, which saves me looping at the expense of memory, OR i'd loop through it realtime to make the hash -- which this method does already without the added step of checking the hash

In reply to web form processing - efficiency question by nmerriweather

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