I had wondered if == "1" was the best technique. This is alllmost my first ever Perl script.

A number of quick functions are used to check user data against input criteria (for checking telephone numbers, postal codes, etc.). The code below is for checking a persons first or last name; one of many checks on this form. All we want to do is verify that more than two characters of an acceptable type are used.

sub check_name {
    my $name = $_[0];
    if ($name =~ /^[A-Z][A-Za-z\-']{2,40}/s) {
        return 1;
    } else {
        return "Friendly message...";
    }
}

[download]

I wanted to return true or false, but wasn't sure how to incorporate an error message anywhere in the many scripts that call this function. It seemed OK to return a true of OK and a string warning if bad. Running with that idea, the "($first_name_check == "1")" test seemed to be the way to go.

It crossed my mind to move the all error messages to a seperate file and return error codes greater than one as index references in the seperate error message file. I haven't seen any good examples of accomplishing this task and would certainly appreciate suggestions on where to go look/read. (All I have is an old Perl cookbook that just seems wrong...

Switch undef around. Thanks for both your suggestions

# was $app{"first_name"} = ""; switch to next line
undef $app{"first_name"};

[download]

In reply to Re^2: Changing the Value Assigned To A Hash Key by gnurob
in thread Changing the Value Assigned To A Hash Key by Anonymous Monk

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