I'm doing a university group project and we're using Perl (which we've only been learning for three odd weeks), and the deadline is VERY close, so if anyone can help us out it'd be great.
These might seem like dumb questions, but the O'Reilly books and all the other sites I've looked at were no help, and I'd rather be proven dumb than fail my course ...

We're programming a questionnaire system, and we've got a login script which verifies a user's identity. This then calls a script which creates the questionnaire, which passes the answers to a final validation script. We have to get the user identity from the login script to the validation script (so that the user can be marked as having filled in the questionnaire, but only once their answers have been validated), but can't just tag it on the end of the URL as plain text when passing it between scripts, cos we are required to keep the user identity secure. We've thought of using cookies, but is there another (simpler) way of doing it?

Also, in the questionnaire script, the questions are named 'questionN' where 'N' is the question number, but in the validation script we need them to be just 'N' ... anyone know how to strip the string 'question' away from the number? :-)

In reply to Urgent help needed by inexperienced programmers by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.