Monni wrote on Aug 26^th, 2014 at 3:55pm:

Exactly.

I'll look at adding a 'isempty' sub to make things neater. (When we start on 2.6.2 I think we'll need to establish Perl 5.010 or even a bit higher as the Perl requirement so we can use newer and better shortcuts. ModuleChecker now has a Perl Version readout so telling people they need a newer version shouldn't be that hard.)

One thing I know for sure is that whenever the check involves a setting read from user vars file or forum settings file, we need to use isempty... because plain undefined check can cause Perl to crash.

Monni wrote on Aug 27^th, 2014 at 10:11am:


This is one of the things I'm testing

sub isempty {
     my ($x, $y) = @_;
     if ( defined $x && $x ne q{} ) {
         $y = $x;
     }
     return $y;
 } 

Not using it on things like vars or boards that are loaded in Load (Those are both fed into hashes so those things need to be checked in Load and I haven't gotten there yet. )

Where I'm using the new sub is in the spots where the result should be 'something', including a '0', but not a 'nothing'. In Settings we have some spots where 'nothing' is allowed but should be a 0 and some spots where it could be a 0 but 'nothing' should be something else. (Like the image sizes.)

I went though all the '||='s, checked on what the possible good results were and decided if it should be a '||=' or a ' = isempty'.

I need to do more testing but should have it in the SVN later today.

(Also converted the '||' related to the fopen function to 'or' - it's lower precidence and it what's usually used for system call errors anyway. Also makes for fewer '||' to check.  :)

$y isn't a local, $y is the alternate value.

$myval = isempty($x, $y); 

if $x isn't empty, it should return $x (even if $x == 0), otherwise it should return $y. (Kind of halfway between $x //= $y; and $x ||= $y;)

Where I'm currently using it is in places where there's a hard-coded good value for $y or in spots where if $y is a bad value, there's a subsequent catcher or it goes to a string like 'ex-member'.

There's one spot I can think of offhand where $z might be useful. (And I can't find it at the moment.    - it had to do with sorting.)

Monni wrote on Aug 27^th, 2014 at 3:44pm:


The only time that should be an issue is if someone is using ancient vars files and didn't process them through one of the Convert utilites on upgrading - in that case they've got more problems than just missing user display names.  :  (YaBB Forum is still has messed up vars files because it didn't get run through Convert - EVER! on any upgrade! EVER!)

I'll track down the multiple Form, Info, whatever calls.

Ah hah - off to check the converters after I get more coffee.