Ciao Monks, it's nice to be back again in the monastery!

I have a question about basic password checking; I already took a look at Data::Password and, in the monastery, to this and this other node (I also tried SuperSearch to check in FAQ and Categorized Questions/Answers, but I got too much garbage and gave up).

What I need is to do just a minimal check, in particular:

• password is at least 5 characters long;
• password contains alphabetic characters and digits
• password isn't a repetition of a few characters or patterns (e.g.: "pippo12": too many p's; "cacca11": only c's and a's, and widely repeated; "32ratatata": the pattern "ta" appears 3 times and covers 60% of the password...)

While the first two points are really easy to code:

sub validate_password {
  my ($field,$pass) = @_ ;
  my $minlen = 5 ;
  return "Field $field: Password too short (min. $minlen chars)"
    if length($pass) < $minlen ;
  return "Field $field: Please use alphabetics and digits (at least)"
    unless $pass =~ /[a-z/i and $pass =~ /\d/ ;
...
[download]

I'm not sure how to manage the third point in a clear and efficient manner, where clear means that the code is enough readable for me to understand when I'll get back to the code after 3 months :-) and efficient is that it doesn require years to run.

I gave up Data::Password because it was too general and UNIX oriented (I'd like my program to be portable). Similarly, Authen::PAM and Crypt::Cracklib don't suit my needs

Any clues?

Ciao!
--bronto

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The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).
--John M. Dlugosz

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