On Thu, 26 May 2005, Alex Brelsfoard wrote:
> Picture a web form that is some sort of a survey. When that survey is
> submit the perl script writes out the answers onto a file. That file
> is tab delimited.
Stop right there, doctor, I think we've found the problem.
If you used a more robust storage format, this problem would go away,
right? For simple, you could just do something like the Windows INI
format, which is just blocks of key/value pairs, and can be driven from
Perl -- provided you don't want to just roll your own code -- using a
module like Config::IniFiles or Config::IniHash:
<http://search.cpan.org/~gcarls/Config-IniFiles/IniFiles.pm>
<http://search.cpan.org/~jenda/Config-IniHash/IniHash.pm>
Or you could get fancy and use a tied hash, a BDB database, a SQLite
database, or a proper database server.
The key thing to keep in mind is that you're currently describing a
brittle format for maintaining lists of key/value pairs, but there's
lots of other ways to go about this.
> In other words, not terribly fun.
Thankfully, these calamities are easily preventable :-)
--
Chris Devers
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