Notes

• http://sourceforge.net/projects/licenseplate/ (haven’t tried this one)
• http://javaanpr.sourceforge.net/ (this one needs to be adapted to US license plates)

If you want Excel to keep a field’s leading zeros when opening a CSV file using Excel, you can change it to =”value”.

For example, if you have a row with 4 values that looks like this:

test,00016102,test,test

Just change it to:

test,="00016102",test,test

I was getting this error:

[Mon Jul 20 12:32:05 2009] [error] [client 192.168.241.233] Premature end of script headers: elite_inventory.pl
[Mon Jul 20 12:32:05 2009] [error] [client 192.168.241.233] DBI connect('my_database','my_user',...) failed: [INTERSOLV][ODBC Informix driver][Informix]Unable to load locale categories. (SQL-HY000) at C:/Program Files/Apache Software Foundation/Apache2.2/htdocs/script.pl line 37

The fix involved modifying Apache’s environment variables using SetEnv in httpd.conf:


SetEnv INFORMIXDIR "C:/informix32"
SetEnv INFORMIXSERVER "isaac_net"
SetEnv DELIMIDENT n
SetEnv DBANSIWARN n
SetEnv CLIENT_LOCAL "en_US.CP1252"
SetEnv DB_LOCAL "en_US.CP1252"


This is because even if the variables are set in the registries in Windows (they are environment variables in Linux), the web server doesn’t use them.

Reference #1 and Reference #2.

You might need to use a different locale under Linux or Unix.

The Ternary Operator

The ternary is actually a sequence of operators. The operator is used like this:

CONDITION-PART ? TRUE-PART : FALSE-PART

which is shorthand for the following statement:

if (CONDITION-PART) {

TRUE-PART

} else {

FALSE-PART

}

Example: If $firstVar is zero, then assign $secondVar a value of zero. Otherwise, assign $secondVar the value in the first element in the array @array.

$secondVar = ($firstVar == 0) ? 0 : $array[0];

via Perl 5 By Example.


if ( $string =~ /[[:^ascii:]]/ ) {
print "String contains characters that are NOT pure ASCII";
}
else {
print "Everything is good, string/pure is valid ASCII.";
}


E.G.: If it contains bytes > 127, it’s not valid ASCII.