Re^5: Tweak for my Perl Regex that screens for digits only

You can truncate a string variable to whatever length you like by using substr.

substr($text_field, 100) = '' if length($text_field) > 100;
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will truncate $text_field to 100 chars. Or you could have your program just abort if it received an oversized field.

Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.

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Re^6: Tweak for my Perl Regex that screens for digits only by hackermike (Novice) on Jan 26, 2006 at 07:48 UTC
Aborting with a not so subtle err msg would be the way to go. Point would be that legit users prob would follow directions, (well, fairly well) and the more time spammers have to waste reading and responding to windy err msg's the better! I've not used substr, how can it be written to generate an err msg if the length exceeds X chars? Thx, Mike	[reply]
Re^7: Tweak for my Perl Regex that screens for digits only by Roy Johnson (Monsignor) on Jan 26, 2006 at 15:52 UTC
You wouldn't use substr to generate an err msg. You'd check length of whatever variable shouldn't be too long, and if it exceeded your limit, you'd have the program die or just not call the code that inserts the information into your data store, and generate a page that informs the user that the data they entered was rejected. `if (length($var) > 30) { # Generate rejection message } else { # Insert data # Generate success message }` [download] Caution: Contents may have been coded under pressure.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^8: check length of field by hackermike (Novice) on Jan 26, 2006 at 18:56 UTC
THANKS ROY! You've stated what I meant to say in my wish to force the user to enter only up to some char limit with perl and the code you wrote slips in to my existing "format" of error checking and error (page) generation. The code you supplied is exactly what I need for ALL of my forms providing customized data input printed to web pages such as listing events and sent by eMail where field lenght needs to be within limits for formatting or spam containment/resistance or to just enforce brevity on users. Thanks again! Gratefully, Mike	[reply]