shravnk:

Wow, I reviewed the code but I'm somewhat at a loss. There are so many things to say that it's difficult to tell where to start.ell, let's see where to start. When I looked it over I found about 12 items in 10 lines of code.

First, I suggest that when you find yourself in the weeds, you should try using the strict, warnings and/or diagnostics modules. Then try to understand and solve each of them. Next, whenever you use a module, it's often very instructive to start with a working example program and make changes incrementally to it, rather than doing it all at once. Making one change at a time to a working example will also help you learn exactly what you're going.

I was thinking of doing a walkthrough item by item, but I don't have that sort of time. Here's a list of issues that you'll need to address:

• Always check your open statements for success
• Be sure you spell a variable name consistently throughout the program
• Double-check the argument lists of functions (hint: reread the docs for XML::Twig's new function)
• Single-quoted strings don't interpolate
• Arrays are 0 based, meaning an $array of two elements contains $array[0] and $array[1]

Other things you'll want to address at some point:

• Use the three-argument form of open
• Use the perl debugger to step through your program and verify that the variables hold what you think they do.
• When you rely on user input, be sure to check it for sanity before blindly using the value. When you check it, be sure to display a useful error message. For example, what happens when the user just presses the Enter key?

I think I'll stop here and let you get some items corrected before continuing...

...roboticus

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