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Re: [MacPerl] matching a $

>if ( ($fname=~/(\D\S)*/)  &&
>     ($lname=~/(\D\S)*/)  ) {
>
> print "<html><head><title></title></head><body
>bgcolor='white'><center>Thank You!</center></body></html>";
>  
>} else {
>
> print "<html><head><title></title></head><body
>bgcolor='white'><center>Sorry but the information was incorrect or
>incomplete, please try again.</center></body></html>";
>     
>}

I wasn't going to weigh in, until I saw what others have posted.  Ronald 
Kimball has come the closest so far, but even his example will reject 
some VALID entries.

Supposedly, what you WANT is a first name and a last name composed only 
of letters, with no spaces or numbers.  However, that's somewhat 
limiting, as I'll explain below.

if (($fname =~ /^[A-Za-z]+$/ ) &&
    ($lname =~ /^[A-Za-z]+$/ )) {

matches the positive case, of only alphabetic characters, one or more 
times.  Matching the negative case is sometimes briefer:

if (($fname =~ /^\D+$/ ) &&
    ($lname =~ /^\D+$/ )) {

But this also matches underscores, spaces, and dashes.  You may *want* 
this for names like "Berners-Lee" and "von Neuman".  One can also:

if (($fname !~ /\d+/ ) &&
    ($lname !~ /\d+/ )) {

Which excludes only the POSITIVE case of digits (one or more) in the 
input strings.  I like this, because it's semantically straightforward.  
However, you need to check too see that the fields are not blank, filled 
with spaces, etc, if I don't miss my mark.

if (($fname !~ /^\s+$|\d+/) &&
    ($lname !~ /^\s+$|\d+/)) {

I'm presuming that you've enabled warnings "-w" in the #!, and that 
you're not passing undefined values of $fname and $lname.  If you're not 
sure, you might also explicitly test for defined().

This code gracefully accepts things like "Berners-Lee" and "van 
Beethoven", but rejects "Grbphtz9" or "    ".   Extraterrestrials and 
nameless entities will just have to look elsewhere. ;-)

Okay, now to go slightly off the subject here, just 'cause  I could, I've 
taken your code fragment, added here-documents, prettified the HTML 
layout, and forced all the tags to uppercase (BBEdit is wonderful!):

if (($fname !~ /^\s+$|\d+/) &&
    ($lname !~ /^\s+$|\d+/)) {
    print <<THANKS;
<HTML>
<HEAD>
    <TITLE>Thank You</TITLE> 
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR='white'>
<CENTER>
    Thank You!
</CENTER>
</BODY>
</HTML>
THANKS

} else {

    print <<OOPS;
<HTML>
<HEAD>
    <TITLE>Sorry</TITLE> 
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR='white'>
<CENTER>
    Sorry but the information was incorrect or incomplete, please try 
again.
</CENTER>
</BODY>
</HTML>
OOPS
     
}

Ultimately, you should probably move your returned HTML to separate files.

Further discussion can go to macperl-anyperl, or macperl-webcgi, 
whichever is more appropriate.

--B

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