Suggestion: allow Object with stringify overloading as passwd in connect()

Transcribed verbatim from CPAN RT#96763, warts and all.

Fri Jun 27 07:25:39 2014 zaucker [...] oetiker.ch - Ticket created Subject: Suggestion: allow Object with stringify overloading as passwd in connect()

Date: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 13:25:25 +0200 (CEST) To: bug-DBI@rt.cpan.org From: Fritz Zaucker zaucker@oetiker.ch

Dear DBI-maintainers,

first of all, many thanks for your great work on this module.

I recently used Damian Conway's IO::Prompter module to ask the user for a DB-password to be used later in a call to DBI->connect().

As it turns out, DBI->connect() tests the parameter passed as password (for being a string, I guess):

     Carp::croak('Usage: $class->connect([$dsn [,$user [,$passwd [,\%attr]]]])')
       if (ref $old_driver or ($attr and not ref $attr) or ref $pass);
#                                                         ^^^^^^^^^

IO::Prompter->prompt() returns an object with lazy evaluation of the user's input (unless called with the -verbatim option). Therefore

my $dsn = 'whatever'; my $user = 'fritz'; my $passwd = IO::Prompter->prompt(); DBI->connect($dsn, $user, $passwd);

will croak().

This would solve the problem:

   use overload;
   Carp::croak('Usage: $class->connect([$dsn [,$user [,$passwd [,\%attr]]]])')
       if (ref $old_driver or ($attr and not ref $attr) or
          (ref $pass and not overload::Method($pass,q{""}));

  (as suggested by Damian).

Now, this is not really a very pressing issue, as I can always use the -verbatim option for IO::Prompter (or force the lazy evaluation before calling DBI->connect().

But perhaps you might want to use the above patch (overload being a core module should make this painless for users of DBI).

Cheers, Fritz

-- Oetiker+Partner AG tel: +41 62 775 9903 (direct) Fritz Zaucker +41 62 775 9900 (switch board) Aarweg 15 +41 79 675 0630 (mobile) CH-4600 Olten fax: +41 62 775 9905 Schweiz web: www.oetiker.ch

perl5-dbi / dbi

Suggestion: allow Object with stringify overloading as passwd in connect() #148