UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Programming PHP and Server-side Scripting Perl Problem - Im sure it aint supposed to do this

This has been bugging me for a few weeks now and I really can't figure out whats causing it.

I am working on a simple news feeder (to update the homepage of my site).

To try and clean up the code a little I want to distribute the subroutines into groups spanned across .pl files.

So I have the core file, I want a .pl file for each of the following types of subroutine:

1. For connecting to the mySQL Database
2. For Template Stuff and related bits (as the admin side doesn't have a template)
3. For Validation Subroutines
4. For Security Subroutines
5. For the Edit/Post/Delete/Archive subroutines.

I want to do this through requiring the .pl files.

The files are created and required. I have required them correctly:

as: require "filename.pl";

Each .pl file simply contains a set of subroutines that can be called within the program (which is complete).

The problem is:

I get a blank screen instead of the application.
Now for the wierd part.
I made a really simple program to test requiring files.

Heres the results:
If I require any 2 .pl files (doesn't matter which - to a point, certain ones don't seem to like each other) it will work.

If I add any more than 2 .pl files I get a blank screen.

I have tried just about every combination of the .pl files too see if there is a "bad" .pl file that was screwing it up, but there isn't.

I'm really confused about this one...



Anyone have any ideas as to why its happening and how to fix it?

add this after perl path:

if you didnt code it carefully, disable warnings and if you are using "use strict;", delete it...

also try to run it with

use strict;
use diagnostics;

they'll give you detailed info...

Thanks a lot, will do that

* crosses fingers hoping it will work *

The code segment kind of helped, in ONE instance. However it was the "use" statements that helped most.

By the way,

thanks the probem is kind of solved (thanks guys).

For some reason the subroutine that my date, time and user time routines are in requires a variable declaration before the subroutines.

Before it was like this:

as a download if ya like too see: (its unfinished)

www.rgamers.com/datetimeoriginal.txt

If I move some variables ourside the subroutine:

www.rgamers.com/datetimenew.txt

If suddenly works...

Now I have "looked into this" on programmersheaven.com to see if there is any logic behind this happening. And I can't see anything that would imply this.

I just feel as if this is a bit of a "cowboy fix" for want of a better phrase.

Not hugely important as the script is only going to be used for my site (although the news program may get put on distribution on free script archives).

But as anyone who is serious about programming will appreciate. If you are going to learn a language, you should learn it properly.

Any ideas why this is making a difference?

I've been using PHP so much lately, that I've forgotten much of how Perl handles variables.

In the first file above, the statements
are executed when sub getdatetime is called. In the second file, those statements are executed when the file is required. I think that's the only difference.

My preference would be to include package declarations in each of the .pl files, and declare all local variables using my. I would also use strict and taint modes. It takes some time to figure out how to do that correctly, but it makes the code more reliable, and less prone to unexpected behavior, so I think it's worthwhile in the long term.

I cant see any errors... Maybe the way you call the function causes an error? If it does not compile under strict (as I see, it doess not) it can be anything... What error did you get? After putting the codes I wrote, you must get something.