Help with validating a hash

I have an if statement on my perl page and it reads cookies.
So I only want the cookie sent once if the user already has one.

Here is the code:
if($paramtest)
{
$ipaddress = $ENV{REMOTE_ADDR};

$value = sprintf("%08.8x",rand()*0xffffff*$ipaddress);

my $c = new CGI::Cookie(-name => 'UniqueID', -value => [$value], -expires => '+3M', -domain => 'komassoc.com', -path => '/');

print "Set-Cookie: $c\n";

%cookies = fetch CGI::Cookie;

$id = $cookies{'UniqueID'}->value;
}else{
%cookie = fetch CGI::Cookie;
$id = $cookies{'UniqueID'}->value;

}


On the else part, if there is no Cookie, it will give a syntax error because the hash %cookie and the value of $id equal nothing. Does anyone know a way I can get around this?


Jonathan Donaghe

As far as i know, you don't need to use the -> operator to get the value out (but I usually assign a handle to CGI, so maybe this works differently. But just to go with what you've got:

$id will be undefined if $cookies{'UniqueID'}->value didn't exist (or return true).

I actually figured it out a day ago. If you take off the ->value it won't give you an error. It gives you an error when you try to use that property and it is null or undefined.
Jonahtan Donaghe