IF statement debacle

[xand75]

Hello,

recently been working on a form to search an sql db, at the moment its a simple 3 fields but ive been unable to get the if statement working.

all the code is below.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use CGI::Carp "fatalsToBrowser";
use CGI ':standard';
use DBI;
$author=param('author');
$keyword=param('keyword');
$publisher=param('publisher');
$user='user';
$pass='pass';
$info='DBI:mysql:database=user;host=mudfoot';
$dbh=DBI->connect($info ,$user ,$pass) or 
die "Can't_connect_to_database";
 
 
 
 
print header();
 
$query1="SELECT * FROM book where Title='$keyword' AND Author='$author' AND Publisher='$publisher'";
$query2="SELECT * FROM book WHERE Title='$keyword' AND Author='$author'";
 
IF ($publisher = 'ANY') {
$sth=$dbh->prepare($query2); 
}
else
{
 
$sth=$dbh->prepare($query1);
}
$sth->execute;
while(@result=$sth->fetchrow_array)
{
    print "Book Title: $result[0], Publisher: $result[1], Author: $result[2], Quantity in Stock: $result[3], Cost: £$result[4] <BR>";
}
 
$sth->finish;
$dbh->disconnect;

only been using perl around 2 days, so if anyone could advise where i've gone wrong it would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks

[eWish]

Welcome to TSDN! & Welcome to Perl!

Your if statement should be lowercase. Also, when you are checking a string to see if it is equal to another string then you don't use the = sign you would use eq or for a numeric value it would be ==.
Check out perlop for more.

if ($publisher eq  'ANY') {

Also, please check out the sticky at the top of this forum.

--Kevin

[eWish]

Also, look into declaring your variables. You will find that most of the common problems can be reduce by good coding practices. Do you have a good book that you are learning from?

Some good resources:
perldoc.perl.org
Beginning Perl
CPAN

--Kevin

[xand75]

Thanks alot for the assistance!

I was also wondering if you could suggest a way of doing something in this script for me.

I wish to create a way so that if any of the 3 search terms are entered, for example if just a keyword was entered and the other fields were left blank it would display all records with that keyword in the title. I know this would be possible by doing similar if statements and having multiple queries, but I was wondering if there would be a cleaner way to do this?

Thanks again!

[eWish]

This is untested, but the concept is what you are after. If the value of the any of the 3 params are blank then undef is used.

my $author = param{'author'} || undef;
my $title = param['title'} || undef;
my $publisher = param{'publisher'} || undef;
 
my $sql = $dbh->prepare('SELECT author, title, publisher FROM $table_name WHERE author = ? OR title = ? OR publisher = ?');
   $sql ->execute($author, $title, $publisher);
 
while (my @rows = $sql->fetchrow_array()) {
 
    print join(',', @rows);
 
}

--Kevin