For me (and I probably should have made this clearer in my prior), your "nearly-but-not-quite code solution" is crucial... and much to be desired! It's a key distinguising difference between teaching how to learn (in the precise manner you discuss) and a complete solution (the site is also littered with these) which -- I fear -- rarely teaches anything other than, perhaps, "Wow, PM's a great place from which to cargo-cult code."

And, yes, a plague on the houses of those who consider noob questions "trivial" or beneath their dignity.

But IMO, and as as educated_foo said earlier, the "tireless scolds" who (in many, but not all cases) remind noobs to demonstrate that they've not asked a question without trying to learn by trying to solve their puzzle, themselves. Agreed, "RTFM" without a link is worthless and discourages those new to the site or to Perl. But a (pleasantly phrased) "RTFM type of reply with a link to the relevant site docs or Perl docs seems to me to be at least as likely to instantiate a teachable moment as almost anything we can do to help.

In reply to Re^3: Put some of the posting guidelines directly above the posting form: by ww
in thread Put some of the posting guidelines directly above the posting form: by TJPride

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.