my() troubles

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I have just begun to use subroutines for my scripts and I have stumbled across the following :

In the following code I declared the $variable input via my in a while() loop. Now I want to access this variable in the "outer" block without having to declare it globally. So that it's just available to the "input" subroutine. How can I accomplish this?

sub input
{
    while ( 1 ) 
    {
        my $input = <STDIN>;
        chomp ( $input );

        if ( $input !~ /\d/ ) 
        {
            print "ILLEGAL INPUT\n";
            next;
        }
    
        last;
    }

    return $input;
}
[download]

Thanks for your help

Comment on my() troubles Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: my() troubles by lemming (Priest) on Feb 14, 2001 at 04:22 UTC
Instead of where you use "last;" You could use "return $input;" on that line or use the example below. I wrote this replacement code `sub input { my $input; print "ILLEGAL INPUT $input\n" while ( chomp($input = <STDIN>) and $input !~ /^\d+$/); return $input; }` [download] I changed it slightly in that it will only return input if $input is a number. Your example would return "spam9" as good input.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: my() troubles by dvergin (Monsignor) on Feb 14, 2001 at 10:50 UTC
To stay closer to your original example, try separating the 'my' statement from the value assignment: `sub input { my $input; # Just the 'my' here while ( 1 ) { $input = <STDIN>; # Asssignment here chomp ( $input ); if ( $input !~ /\d/ ) { print "ILLEGAL INPUT\n"; next; } last; } return $input; }` [download] Now the scope of '$input' is the entire sub block and 'return $input;' will work.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: my() troubles by a (Friar) on Feb 14, 2001 at 10:43 UTC
If I've got your question correctly, `my $digit_input = &input;` [download] that is (in the sub); return $input; makes the sub input give back the value of $input. a	[reply] [d/l]