To elaborate on what the others have said: one aspect of good coding/experience is to appropriately choose library code rather than write everything yourself. If you are, as seems likely, parsing CGI parameters, then either the well-used CGI.pm or a related module (e.g. CGI::Lite) might be of use. As you might know, you'll find lots of information on modules on CPAN. This is one of perl's major strengths - there is a lot of useful code already written. (But you do need to be a little selective - perhaps some of it doesn't quite do what you need, etc.)

In the specific case of the code you've posted, one of the best pieces of advice I'd give is to name things (variables, functions, objects, methods) carefully - and don't be afraid of renaming them if their purpose (or your understanding of their purpose changes).

In this example, people are guessing that you're writing CGI-parsing code, because you've got variables called $string and @array. This doesn't really convey any information to the reader. It would be much better to write something like: 

my $cgi_query_string = "name=alex&sex=m";
my @components = split(/&/, $cgi_query_string);
my %query;
foreach my $component (@components) {
  my ($name, $value) = split(/=/, $component);
  $query{$name} = $value;
}

[download]
otherwise, what you've written is fairly good, idiomatic perl. If you're interested in some other, nice, more modern idioms, take a look in List::Util and List::MoreUtils. These don't really apply to your code above, but they are a nice way of removing some loops and lines from your code and simultaneously expressing the intent of what you're trying to do more clearly.

Also, there is a lot (too much?) in the [id://Tutorials] section and also a lot of good advice in the book "Perl Best Practices".

In reply to Re: How to write better code? by jbert
in thread How to write better code? by Anonymous Monk

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