[Expectperl-discuss] Using a hash to store prompts & responses?

[John B. (Lists) <li...@jo...>]

Hi all,

Trying to drive an interactive session with some telecomms kit. It's a
very simple interface - it gives a series of fixed prompts to which the
user enters a response, nothing fancy but quite tedious.

I have a Perl hash with the prompts as keys and the responses as the
hashed values.

Example of a session...
REQ NEW
TYPE TIE
CUST 0
...
where REQ, TYPE and CUST are the kit's prompts - always on a new line
ending with a space.  NEW, TIE and 0 are the corresponding responses.  

So the draft code is...

$exp->expect($timeout,
  [
    qr/^REQ /,
      sub {
        $self = shift;
        $self ->send($args{"REQ"}, "\n");
        exp_continue
      }
  ],
  [
    qr/^TYPE /,
      sub {
        $self = shift;
        $self ->send($args{"TYPE"}, "\n");
        exp_continue;
      }
  ],
  [
    qr/^CUST /,
      sub {
        $self = shift;
        $self ->send($args{"CUST"}, "\n");
        exp_continue;
      }
  ],
# Hundreds more patterns here...
...
...
);

This works fine however I'd like to build the expect loop during
execution using the %args hash as it's easier to add hash pairs than
have to modify code when a new prompt appears.

Is this supported with Expect.pm? If so, any hints on the best way to
code this?

Thanks,
John.