Question

I am connecting to a database and I am taking an input from STDIN that I use as part of an execution.
So I have:

my $i = 0;

while($i != 1) {
    print "Input: ";
    my $input = <STDIN>;
    chomp $input;
    my $test = $dbh->prepare("show tables like $input");

and then I want to check that the input is a valid entry in the database and loop round again if it isn’t:

    if ($test->execute()) {
        print "Input exists in database\n";
        $i = 1;
    }
    else {
        print "Input does not exist.\n";
    }
} # end of while

I know that this does not work, but I would like something similar that isn’t execute or die as I do not want to exit my program. Is this possible?

Answer 1

I actually found the solution I wanted a different way, but thanks to pmakholm for answering.

my $i = 0;

while($i != 1) {
    print "Input: ";
    my $input = <STDIN>;
    chomp $input;
    my $test = $dbh->prepare("show tables like $input");
    my $var = $test->execute();
    if ($var != 0) {
        print "Input exists in database\n";
        $i = 1;
    }
    else {
        print "Input does not exist.\n";
    }
} # end of while

What I didn’t think of is that even if I enter nonsense into the database, I’m looking to see if that table exists – and if it doesn’t it just returns an empty set, so I can check if is zero (checking if NULL or similar may be better but this works). I thought that it would return an error, but it doesn’t. pmakholm – I shall use your method if I need to check that query works, so thanks.