| > What if I change my name to a symbol (like the artist formerly | > known as Prince)? | > | > Some ideas for my new name: | > rm -rf * | > /dev/null | > pop @women | > | Then you'll be tarred and feathered and run out on a rail. :)
Too much validation in a single regular expression is a bad thing, since it overcomplicates the regex. In a real program you'd want to validate both the name and the email as a seperate function, as it would probably be checked in several places. The approach I took reliably extracts the data, but I haven't been taken over by the validation virus. However, it'd be easy to see how to add it: if (/...regex.../) { my ($id, $name, $email) = ($1, $2, $3); die "Invalid identifier" unless valid_id($id); die "Invalid name" unless valid_name($name); ... } To my mind, this approach is a little more verbose - both in terms of quantity of code and the quality of the error reporting. To make up for the former, it does make it much easier to read than a single regex threatening to wrap around a few times at 79 chars. TIMTOWTDI Jonathan Paton __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]