Leila Lappin wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I need to write a subroutine that validates several fields and returns one
summary field containing names of what >failed. I was thinking of
concatenating names of all fields that failed and return that string from
the subroutine. Then >check the string (return value) and if it's not null
update the data base with it. Is that considered a good style for >Perl?
You're going to run into trouble just concatenating the field names- how
would you be able to tell where one name started and another left off? You
could separate them with some character and use split to get an array
containing the names- but if you're going to do that, why not just push them
onto an array and return that?
in pseudocode:
my @failed;
if (field fails validation){
push @failed, $fieldname;
}
etc.
Strings hide the structure of your data- to use data (other than a single
string of course :) ) stored in a string you're going to have to go to the
extra trouble of parsing the string. Better to use a data structure that
supports the operations that you're going to need.
But if all you're going to do with the return value is use it in a sql
statement it would be reasonable to write a subroutine that returned a piece
of that sql statement as a string (which would be a little (but maybe not
much) more complicated than just concatenating the fieldnames), since that's
all you will need.
Tagore Smith
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