On 09/09/2018 02:11 PM, Rick T wrote:
I don’t know whether my difficulty is with my perl or with my logic;
but either way I need a fresh mind on this.
If I test the subroutine by feeding it a file name that does not exist
in any format, I expect it to die — but it does not.
Any good ideas will be greatly appreciated!
Rick
sub get_course_data {
# check for course_file in .txt format; try to make one if not
if ( (!-e "$pf{course_file}.txt" ) # if there's no .txt file
that is doing a hash lookup on the %pf hash. is that what you want?
and
( -e "$pf{course_file}.db" ) # but there is a .db file
){
convert_course_file();
how does that sub know what file to process?
}
else {
die "Cannot find course file for $pf{course_file}";
}
it would be much cleaner to rewrite that sub like this (untested rough
code):
sub get_course_data {
# don't use globals to pass in data like your code does
my( $course_base ) = @_
my $txt_file = "$course_base.txt" ;
# this could be a one liner with a if modifier.
# convert_course_file may not return anything useful but we leave anyway
as we found the file
if ( -e $txt_file ) {
return convert_course_file( $txt_file ) ;
}
my $db_file = "$course_base.db" ;
if ( -e $db_file ) {
return convert_course_file( $db_file ) ;
}
die "can't find any $course_base file" ;
alternative is to loop over the suffixes as most of the code is duplicated:
foreach my $suf ( qw( txt db ) ) {
my $file_name = "$course_base.$suf" ;
if ( -e $file_name ) {
return convert_course_file( $file_name ) ;
}
}
die "painful death because $course_base ain't there" ;
