Re: [Omaha.pm] Substitution loop

["Rob Townley" <rob.townley@gmail.com>]

On 7/31/07, Dan Linder <dan@linder.org> wrote:

Jay Hannah wrote:
> But what is a fatal "Substitution loop" error from Perl?
>
> I've never seen that one before. It disappeared without me changing
> anything and I can't make it happen again.
>
> Probably user error.   :)
>
From "http://search.cpan.org/~nwclark/perl-5.8.8/pod/perldiag.pod":
Substitution loop : (P) The substitution was looping infinitely.
(Obviously, a substitution shouldn't iterate more times than there are
characters of input, which is what happened.) See the discussion of
substitution in "Quote and Quote-like Operators" in perlop.

I can't see how the simple "$d1=~s/[^\d]//g;" could cause the loop as
described above -- what happens if $d1 was all numbers - if there is a
bug in the length check, then it could count X characters but try to run
X+1 times and get that error...  (Just a shot in the dark, though.)

Do you have a way of catching the error next time and logging the
initial contents of $d1?

Dan

--
- - - -
"Wait for that wisest of all counselors, time." -- Pericles "I do not
fear computers, I fear the lack of them." -- Isaac Asimov


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i bet it depends on the content of the string input - if you have all digits, i bet you do not get an error.  Doesn't it mean that you putting into the s string a character that is not a number, so it is replaced again, then removed again, replaced ad infinitum.