Perl

Also described as "It kinda does what you expect it to, unless you expect it to make sense"  Basically a huge number of kludges thrown together that do actually make an incredibly powerful glue for linking smaller programs together.  Extremely good at what it does.  Has recently acquired object orientation, for added obfuscation.  --Vitenka

Version 6 currently resembles a Nomic game on Steroids?. -- Senji

 $_ = 1; (1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print while $_++

I now think I know roughly what it's meant to do (with the help of DavidWaller?), but we can't work out what "print while" is supposed to do. As it happens, when I ran it at work, it simply printed out 23. --CH

(MoonShadow) If it helps, print's default parameter is $_. It seems the scope of the while loop is supposed to the entire statement. print might not flush on some platforms until it encounters an end of line or the script terminates. A slightly more readable / portable version might be the following:

 $_ = 1; do { (1 x $_) !~ /^(11+)\1+$/ && print "$_\n" } while $_++

An extra belated vote of much niftiness to the author of this one...  --K

 my $tmp = $initialvalue; # initialvalue is re-used later and shouldn't be changed
 $tmp =~ s/abc/def/;
 print $tmp;

 for( $initialvalue ) { local $_; s/abc/def/; print; }

 { local $initialvalue; $initialvalue =~ s/abc/def/; print $initialvalue; }

 $name =~ s/$pattern/$replace/oi;

 pjt33@charis:/tmp/$ cat >test.pl
 $replace='qu$1';
 $text='foobarbaz';
 $text =~ s/arb/$replace/oi;
 print $text;
 pjt33@charis:/tmp/$ perl ./test.pl 
 foobqu$1az

I thought he meant he wanted the variable $1 to be inserted, not the literal string "$1". BICBW. --Rachael

 #! /usr/bin/perl -w
 use strict;
 my $a = '"x${1}x"'; # note the nesting of single and double quotes
 my $b = 'abc';
 $b =~ s/(b)/eval($a)/e;
 print "$b\n";

 axbxc

Thanks.  I tried s/$pattern/"$replace"/ee, which I was led to believe was equivalent to the above, but I'll try again when I get into work and see what happens. --K

Turns out that I can append the quotes to the replace variable beforehand but can't add them in the regex itself.  That combined with the 'o' bug mean I now have a working function!  Thanks again :) --K

my @people;
@people = XMLTree::getTextsByPath($output, 'autnresponse', 'responsedata', 'autn:field', 'autn:value');

if (wantarray()) {
    	print "In list context\n";
    	return @results;
} elsif (defined wantarray()) {
	print "In scalar context\n";
	return $results[0];
} else {
	print "In void context\n";
	return;  # nothing
}

I don't see anything problematic with that in itself. What's the rest of getTextsByPath? like? Does it recurse? Does the above code work as expected if you remove all the *other* code from getTextsByPath? (except for the declaration of @results, if you're in strict mode)? - MoonShadow

getTextsByPath doesn't recurse, but it calls another function, which does. I've commented out all the other code in getTextsByPath and it still prints "In scalar context".

Are you sure the getTextsByPath? you're altering is the one that is being called? Try defining the sub in the same scope, in the same file. It may be that you're actually invoking a different piece of code that then calls the code you're looking at in scalar context and returns the result. That's about all I can think of, really. - MoonShadow

It's definitely the same one - I'm stepping into it in the debugger and seeing it's the code I've just modified. --Rachael

 @people = XMLTree::getTextsByPath?($output, 'autnresponse', 'responsedata', 'autn:field', 'autn:value');

 @people = XMLTree::getTextsByPath?($output, 'autnresponse', 'responsedata', 'autn:field', 'autn:value') || die;

 >  perl -e "open DIR, 'test'; my @a = readdir(DIR); print scalar(@a);"
 0
 >  ls test
 a  b

opendir, not open. Also, you'll see 4 entries, because of . and .. - MoonShadow

Gaaaah! *kickself* Thanks. (You'd think it would warn for that (in the original full script which has -w), or is there some context where you would want to use open on a dir?) --Rachael

 if ($^O eq "MSWin32")
 { WindowsOnlyFunction?();}
 else
 { UnixOnlyFunction?();}

Use eval(). --MoonShadow

Excellent, thanks. That works fine around ordinary blocks of code. It doesn't work around use statements though. --Rachael

Why not? I've used it that way. What precisely are you doing? (Of course, the scope of the use statement will be limited to the inside of the eval block, so you have to rejiggle your code accordingly...) --MoonShadow

 Can't locate Mail/Sendmail?.pm in @INC (@INC contains: C:/users/rchurchill/i2etest/index/bin/../lib C:/Perl?/lib  C:/Perl?/site/lib .) at C:\users\rchurchill\i2etest\index/bin/run_make_index.pl line 204.
 BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at C:\users\rchurchill\i2etest\index/bin/run_make_index.pl line 204.

 if ($windows) #$windows is defined earlier as my $windows = ($^O eq "MSWin32") ;
 {
    # send mail using blat.exe
 }
 else
  {
    eval {
        use Mail::Sendmail;
        my %mail = ( To => join(";", @mailto), From => "$user".'@linguamatics.com',
                     Subject => "TESTS [$result] $suffix ($version)",
                     Message => $message, smtp => 'mail.linguamatics.com');
        sendmail(%mail) or warn $Mail::Sendmail::error;
    }
 }

 if ($windows) #$windows is defined earlier as my $windows = ($^O eq "MSWin32") ;
 {
    # send mail using blat.exe
 }
 else
  {
    eval <<'END_OF_CODE'
        use Mail::Sendmail;
        my %mail = ( To => join(";", @mailto), From => "$user".'@linguamatics.com',
                     Subject => "TESTS [$result] $suffix ($version)",
                     Message => $message, smtp => 'mail.linguamatics.com');
        sendmail(%mail) or warn $Mail::Sendmail::error;

    ;
 }

Yay, that works - thanks! --Rachael