Re: clean code

I pretty much like what you have already! It's easy to understand and robust. The only thing I think you really ought to change are the backslashes in the split regexes, which shouldn't be there.

All the other changes I'd make are superficial. Structurally, the temporary variable @vals can be eliminated by putting it within the loop initializer. Stylistically, I think you ought to leave off the comment marking the end of the loop, as you're already practicing proper indentation, and that's sufficient. Here's some code I might have written:

# extract name-value pairs from serialized database row
for my $pair ( split( /;/, $serialized_row ) ) {
   my ( $name, $value ) = split( /=/, $pair );
   $record{$name} = $value;
}
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--
Marvin Humphrey
Rectangular Research ― http://www.rectangular.com

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Re^2: clean code by sfink (Deacon) on Apr 23, 2006 at 05:42 UTC
Make that `split(/=/, $pair, 2)` and your values will be allowed to have equals signs. For most casual applications, I usually use `split(/\s=\s/, $pair, 2)`. I like spaces. I'd do the same for the semicolon split. But considering the comment (this is from a serialized db row), I doubt there's much point. To be more robust (specifically: to allow arbitrary characters in the names and values), I agree with the suggestions to use URI escaping. Since you're programmatically generating the data you're parsing, there's no reason not to do the job right -- your first concern should be correctness, second should be basic human readability (so you can tell what's going on), and a very distant third should be human writability (for debugging, casual testing, off-the-cuff model manipulation, etc.)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: clean code by creamygoodness (Curate) on Apr 23, 2006 at 18:21 UTC
sfink++ on the additional argument to split(). As for the comment, the original post did not make clear the purpose of the code block. I always code in commented paragraphs (as per Perl Best Practices), and such comments should be as specific as possible. However, I didn't want to make a big deal about that personal stylistic choice it because it wasn't germane. Several other posters made what I think was a reasonable assumption that the purpose of the block was CGI processing, presumably based on the structure of the data and the name of the `$memory_data` variable. Processing of CGI query strings raises a host of issues I didn't want to get into, so I made a different assumption about the nature of the data. :) -- Marvin Humphrey Rectangular Research ― http://www.rectangular.com	[reply] [d/l]