{"id":304,"date":"2006-09-17T11:34:07","date_gmt":"2006-09-17T15:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/hacking_mt_26_or_i_dont_understand_perl"},"modified":"2006-09-17T11:34:07","modified_gmt":"2006-09-17T15:34:07","slug":"hacking_mt_26_or_i_dont_understand_perl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2006\/09\/hacking_mt_26_or_i_dont_understand_perl.html","title":{"rendered":"Hacking MT 2.6; Or, I Don’t Understand Perl"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’m trying to make a couple of minor modifications to my Movable Type installation’s MT::App::Comments<\/code> Perl module, in order to make life a little more difficult for comment spammers. My goal is hampered slightly because I don’t know a damn thing about Perl.<\/p>\n

In fact, the only language I know reasonably<\/em> well is Java. Which means that any time I look at code for Language X, my brain does its best to overlay Java syntax on top of Language X, adding in any bits of Language X that I might have accidentally picked up over the years.[1<\/a>]<\/small><\/sup> For example, I can read C++, sort of, because Java’s syntax was designed to be a lot like C++. Except that C++ has all these funny characters sprinkled in: ampersands and asterisks and God knows what else. And when my brain goes down into the depths to retrieve the meaning of these funny characters, it unlocks a door called “CS 5<\/a>“,[2<\/a>]<\/small><\/sup> and I curl up in a fetal ball and start rocking back and forth and moaning, and the only thing that snaps me out of it is hearing my co-worker Jud singing “The Lunchtime Song.” Yes, we really have a lunchtime song. Want to make something of it?<\/p>\n

Anyway, Movable Type is written in Perl, and the module that handles comments contains several hundred lines of code, some of which looks like:<\/p>\n

if (!$q->param('text')) {\n    return $app->handle_error($app->translate(\"Comment text is required.\"));\n}<\/pre>\n
Now, even my poor little Java-addled brain can understand what this means. For starters, I understand “if<\/code>” and curly braces. I undertand the “!<\/code>“, the “return<\/code>“, and the basic idea behind “handle_error(stuff<\/var>);<\/code>“. Heck, I even think I understand “q->param('text')<\/code>“! And in fact, if you try to submit a comment and you leave the “text” field blank, you do indeed get an error message:<\/p>\n
Comment text is required.<\/pre>\n
Try it! It’s fun!<\/p>\n
So as a test of my elite Perl-hacking skills, I changed the snippet above to:<\/p>\n
if (!$q->param('text')) {\n    return $app->handle_error($app->translate(\"Comment text is required, silly<\/strong>.\"));\n}<\/pre>\n
But to my great disappointment, submitting a comment with no text resulted in:<\/p>\n
Comment text is required.<\/pre>\n
This could mean one of two things:<\/p>\n