On Sat, 7 Apr 2018, at 07:24, Bill Stephenson wrote: > I’ve been working on a “comments” feature for my “CherryPC blog”. > > I don’t want readers to have to make a user account to comment so I’m > wanting to use a perl script on the server side that has the user > credentials in the $url variable below. > > This is the code I’m using to update the document with the comment. > > # Convert the JSON to a perl object > > my $data_structure = decode_json(`curl -X GET $url`);
Hi Bill, I think all the responses so far have given you a piece of the puzzle, but not the whole. Hopefully this completes the picture. TLDR just use Store::CouchDB, and all of the conversion will "just happen" directly https://metacpan.org/release/Store-CouchDB [snip] given this JSON object as an example of what gets converted to/from perl objects: GET /testy/data HTTP/1.1 Host: localhost:5984 Accept: application/json Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate User-Agent: bat/0.1.0 HTTP/1.1 200 OK Content-Length : 111 Cache-Control : must-revalidate Server : CouchDB/1.7.1 (Erlang OTP/19) Etag : "1-75710f70ac64e43a12fbc76ca3305852" Date : Sat, 07 Apr 2018 21:58:56 GMT Content-Type : application/json { "_id": "data", "_rev": "1-75710f70ac64e43a12fbc76ca3305852", "object": { "nested": true }, "array": [ 1, "2", false, null ] } The JSON should be self-explanatory but its useful to see how the same data is represented in perl. So here's a very short perl program to show you how much easier this is using Store::CouchDB and the automatic perl<->JSON conversions. #!/usr/bin/env perl use Modern::Perl; use Store::CouchDB; use Data::Printer caller_info => 1; # connect to our couch and existing db my $c = Store::CouchDB->new({host => 'localhost', db => 'testy'}); # fetch a JSON doc and auto-convert it to a perl object my $doc = $c->get_doc('data'); # dump out the perl object we got back # it's not so scary p $doc; # look up a simple plain text value say $doc->{'_id'}; # nested objects can be traversed by name # true in JSON is mapped to 1 in perl (truthy) # and will round-trip correctly say $doc->{'object'}->{'nested'}; exit 0; The output follows; in your terminal it will be in glorious colour: ./relax.pl Printing in line 15 of ./relax.pl: \ { _id "data", _rev "1-75710f70ac64e43a12fbc76ca3305852", array [ [0] 1, [1] 2, [2] JSON::PP::Boolean { Parents Types::Serialiser::BooleanBase public methods (0) private methods (0) internals: 0 }, [3] undef ], object { nested JSON::PP::Boolean { Parents Types::Serialiser::BooleanBase public methods (0) private methods (0) internals: 1 } } } data 1 note how the doc id "data" is a simple string, and the JSON::PP::Boolean object, and undef, is used to ensure that the JSON true, false, and null values respectively have an equivalent definition in perl that can be safely round-tripped back to JSON. > From what I understand "use utf8” forces the all data to be utf-8... I highly recommend getting chromatic's book https://pragprog.com/book/swperl/modern-perl-fourth-edition and reading it immediately. There's a free online version http://www.onyxneon.com/books/modern_perl/index.html but it's well worth the pennies. A few hours reading this will power up your perl skills enormously I think. > If anyone has any ideas and/or advice on how to deal with this I’d sure > appreciate them. I’ve pretty much ran out of them at this point. TLDR use a library and then you can skip all the pain of shelling out to external programs. Also this is a very risky strategy - sanitising user input that is passed to/from curl and so forth is dangerous, especially on the internet. The same goes for date/time handling, look on metacpan.org and find a library to do the heavy lifting for you. Finally, http://mojolicious.org/ is a very good modern perl web framework. In a future incarnation of your site/app it may be very helpful, but I suspect you've already done enough not to want to start from scratch. Good luck! A+ Dave
