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How not to write Perl?
You can write a piece of code that resembles a Picasso ... or a piece of code that resembles a dog's dinner ... in Perl. And, rush job yesterday, I wanted to analyse a web access log file and find the number of unique visiting hosts listed. Here's what I came up with:
open (FH,"t09");VERY quick. And VERY dirty, but it works: [root@p15161732 logs]# perl t09dSo that's 291 unique hosts, and also some stats on who they are / the distribution of hits. Why do I question whether or not this is good Perl? Because it will be VERY HARD to maintain later on. Variable names are not descriptive. No comments. No data validation. No checking to see if the input file actually exists. No report on the output as to what it is. No copyright statement / author notes. And that's just or starters. For a one off - strictly a one off - these things probably don't matter; after all, Perl is the PRACTICAL extraction and reporting language and it did a very practical job of extracting what I needed here! Learn Perl The web page I was analysing (written 2008-01-15 23:43:34) Associated topics are indexed under P210 - Perl - Topicalization and Special Variables
Some other Articles
Summer Ball at Bowood - Saturday 12th July 2008Buses from Well House Manor, Melksham, to Bath Handling Binary data (.gif file example) in Perl Extracting information from a file of records How not to write Perl? Comments on proposed Asda Superstore for Melksham Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions Script to present commonly used images - PHP Flooding by Asda-s proposed new supermarket Web page (http) error status 405 1694 posts, page by page
Link to page ... 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 at 50 posts per pageThis is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price. Link to Ezine home page (for reading). Link to Blogging home page (to add comments). |
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