VB likes to make this nice and available, it just seems so easy with VB, until you need real power. People tend to dismiss Perl's exception handling and error catching mechanisms as brute force - but they are flexible and powerful. I have found that the latter is more desireable.

In Perl, all expressions evalute to a value - if that value is non-zero, then it is true. Say you want to know if a worksheet is missing:

# lots of code assumed before this line
my $oWkS = $oBook->{Worksheet}[$sheet] or die "sheet doesn't exist";
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It's really that simple. If it's exception handling you need, Perl provides that via eval and die:

eval {
    open FILE, $file;
}
die "$file did not open for reading" if $@;
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When you place you questionable code inside an eval block, any errors will be stored in $@ - the trick is you have to check $@ _immediately_ after a possible exception, the next exception will wipe out the first.

When looping, the next and last commands are very valuable:

while (1) {
    next if $_ = 'just skip this';
    last if $_ = 'fatal exception';
}
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That was a very simple and pointless example just to get the point across. next and last are very consise ways to handle exceptions.

You can also find CPAN modules that take care of this for you, such as Error.

If you feel you need a centralized repository for errors, just create your own Errors Object. I discussed this very thing in (jeffa) Re: style for returning errors from subroutines, but that solution will have to be re-constructed to fit your needs. The idea is there, however.

Good luck, i hope my pointers help, i am sure that others will supply alternatives . . . :)

Jeff

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