Testing For A Number

16 Apr 2009 — eric

Although you generally don’t have to worry about types in Perl, it is occasionally necessary to ensure that you are working with numbers. Your test cases should notify you that something is amiss when you didn’t get a number (when you were expecting one). Thankfully Scalar::Util provides a method to deal with this.

use Scalar::Util qw( looks_like_number );

my @possibleNumbers = qw(1 5.25 word 4);

foreach my $nums (@possibleNumbers) {
       print "$nums is", looks_like_number($nums) ? '' : ' not', " a number\n";
}

This will print:

1 is a number
5.25 is a number
word is not a number
4 is a number

This neat little method takes advantage of Perl C API’s looks_like_number() function. Since this is virtually native, it will be pretty fast.

Posted in Perl. Tags: . No Comments »

Cleaning Up Long Conditionals With Grep

7 Apr 2009 — eric

Every so often I am faced with testing a few conditionals before dropping into another control structure. If you have to test out a few conditionals, then its likely a dispatch table won’t be useful. If you have a lot of conditionals to test, you’ll likely not want to deal with an ugly expression like the following:

if ( (defined $SITE{$partner}{'foo'} && ($SITE{$partner}{'foo'} > 0) ) and
        ( (defined $assoc{'foo'} && ($assoc{'foo'} > 0)) or
          (defined $assoc{'bar'} && ($assoc{'bar'} > 0)))
   ) {
print "We're here!\n";
}

One of the ways to deal with it to to use grep. Since grep returns the number of elements in the array that evaluate to true (when called in a scalar context), I can do the following to make it work:

my @foo = [ $SITE{$partner}{'foo'}, $assoc{'foo'}, $assoc{'bar'} ];
if ( (grep {defined($_) and $_ > 0} @foo) > 2) { print "We're here!\n"; }

The reason this works is that when called in the scalar context, grep only returns the number of elements that evaluate to true. Since there are 3 elements in the array, the return value is greater than 2, then the entire expression evaluates to true. This is not only a lot easier to read and a lot cleaner to write, but it makes for easy additions to the conditional testing if necessary. Although changing the context in which functions are called is common, it is easily forgotten. Grep called in scalar context can be easily manipulated (as above) to add readability to your program.

Posted in Perl. Tags: , . 1 Comment »

Counting Email Addresses By Domain in MySQL

1 Apr 2009 — eric

Every so often I find some statistical need that although Perl program would be easy to write for it, its probably something the database should just handle. So I have a column in an email management table that has just the email addresses in the format user@domain.tld.

I want to know which domains make up the majority of the users. (The numbers have been changed to protect the innocent):

mysql> SELECT SUBSTRING_INDEX(email, '@', -1) as Domain, count(*) as Total
      FROM email_list
GROUP BY Domain
ORDER BY Total DESC
       LIMIT 15;
+----------------+---------+
| Domain         | Total   |
+----------------+---------+
| yahoo.com      | 1304000 |
| hotmail.com    |  908400 |
| aol.com        |  800000 |
| msn.com        |  168000 |
| gmail.com      |  161000 |
| comcast.net    |  143000 |
| sbcglobal.net  |  110000 |
| bellsouth.net  |   62000 |
| cox.net        |   58000 |
| verizon.net    |   56000 |
| earthlink.net  |   52000 |
| charter.net    |   46000 |
| juno.com       |   30000 |
| optonline.net  |   22000 |
| netzero.com    |   17000 |
+----------------+---------+
Posted in MySQL. Tags: , . 10 Comments »
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