Question

I have a Perl script and I am trying to make it print out the value for $article when it errors. The script looks like:

eval{
    for my $article($output =~ m/<value lang_id="">(.*?)<\/value>/g)
    { 
        $article =~ s/ /+/g;
        $agent->get("someurl");

        $agent->follow_link(url_regex => qr/(?i:pdf)/ );

        my $pdf_data = $agent->content;
        open my $ofh, '>:raw', "$article.pdf"
        or die "Could not write: $!";
        print {$ofh} $pdf_data;
        close $ofh;
        sleep 10;
    }
};
if($@){
    print "error: ...: $@\n";
}

So if there is no .pdf file the code sends an error which is what I want. But what I need to know is it somehow possible to get the name of the $article that caused the error? I was trying to use some kind of global variable with no luck.

Answer 1

Why don’t you put the eval inside the for loop? Something like this:

for my $article($output =~ m/<value lang_id="">(.*?)<\/value>/g)
{ 
   $article =~ s/ /+/g;
   eval{
      # ...
   }
   if ($@) {
      print STDERR "Error handling article: ", $article, " ", $!, "\n";
   }
}