An extremely safe eval

MattEvans 0 387 Views

Ever wanted to evaluate a user-provided expression, maybe from a form input or otherwise, and return the result? eval($expr) is dangerous because eval(open $out, "> file.what"); will open the file, infact, eval(everything) will pretty much do everything. checking though everything is tedious, and manually parsing everything seems like a waste of time.

Well. I found the Safe module and spent a while figuring it out, Safe is included in all present distributions of Perl. The main thing to figure out is which opcodes to allow for a reasonable eval and nothing dangerous. Well, here they are to save you time:

use Safe;

sub safeEval{

my($expr) = @_;

my($cpt) = new Safe;

#Basic variable IO and traversal
$cpt->permit_only(qw(null scalar const padany lineseq leaveeval rv2sv));
#Comparators
$cpt->permit(qw(lt i_lt gt i_gt le i_le ge i_ge eq i_eq ne i_ne ncmp i_ncmp slt sgt sle sge seq sne scmp));
#Base math
$cpt->permit(qw(preinc i_preinc predec i_predec postinc i_postinc postdec i_postdec int hex oct abs pow multiply i_multiply divide i_divide modulo i_modulo add i_add subtract i_subtract));
#Binary math
$cpt->permit(qw(left_shift right_shift bit_and bit_xor bit_or negate i_negate not complement));
#Regex
$cpt->permit(qw(match split qr));
#Conditionals
$cpt->permit(qw(cond_expr flip flop andassign orassign and or xor));
#Advanced math
$cpt->permit(qw(atan2 sin cos exp log sqrt rand srand));

my($ret) = $cpt->reval($expr);

if($@){
  return $@;
}else{
  return $ret;
}

}
Member Avatar for KevinADC
KevinADC 192 Practically a Posting Shark

good information

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