Perl: Variable input via HTML Post: 62175

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Perl: Variable input via HTML Post 62175 by cbkihong on Saturday 12th of February 2005 10:10:06 AM

02-12-2005

Registered User

First, make sure you have a proper shebang for perl. /bin/perl? I rarely see perl installed in /bin, but if it's indeed there then forget it.

Modern perl scripters no longer craft hacks to read form data from standard input primitively. In those code, POST form data used to be read from <STDIN> according to CGI specification, from which the content in the form of &-separated key=value pairs are usually extracted with a combination of split() and regular expressions. You may still find examples with code like this. However, this is prone to errors and is no longer recommended. The Perl community has agreed on a common standard - the CGI module. If your tutorial doesn't mention the CGI module, it should be considered out of date already and you ought to cast some questioning glances on it.

Here I modified your script a little bit to put in the missing parts. The CGI module knows how to find out whether a POST or GET form is involved, and then read and extract form data with the appropriate method for you. No fiddling of those dirty things required anymore:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;

my $cgi = new CGI;
print $cgi->header('text/html');

if (defined $cgi->param('ok')) {
 my %params = $cgi->Vars;
 print "My name is: ${params{realname}}<br>";
 print "My email is: ${params{email}}<br>";
} else {
print <<ENDHTML;
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>CGI Test</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>
<FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="mycgi.pl">
name: <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME="realname"><BR>
email: <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME="email"><BR>
<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT NAME="ok">
</FORM>
</BODY>
</HTML>

ENDHTML
}

Some perl people actually recommend you to use the CGI object exclusively to output the form completely with its API rather than hardcoding the HTML tags in print() statements, but I think this is just a matter of taste. Isolating form snippet in templates and construct form output dynamically with a template engine (such as Template Toolkit) is seen as an even better approach.

Just put the script (mycgi.pl) in your Web server, give it executable chmod, and that should work. It should work if you have a reasonably recent version of CGI. It should be, if your Perl version is recent enough. The CGI module is shipped with Perl by default.

Last edited by cbkihong; 02-12-2005 at 11:00 PM.. Reason: use $cgi->header() instead of legacy way

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html::elementraw

HTML::ElementRaw(3pm)					User Contributed Perl Documentation				     HTML::ElementRaw(3pm)

NAME

       HTML::ElementRaw - Perl extension for HTML::Element(3).

SYNOPSIS

	 use HTML::ElementRaw;
	 $er = new HTML::ElementRaw;
	 $text = '<p>I would like this &nbsp; HTML to not be encoded</p>';
	 $er->push_content($text);
	 $h = new HTML::Element 'h2';
	 $h->push_content($er);
	 # Now $text will appear as you typed it, non-escaped,
	 # embedded in the HTML produced by $h.
	 print $h->as_HTML;

DESCRIPTION

       Provides a way to graft raw HTML strings into your HTML::Element(3) structures.	Since they represent raw text, these can only be leaves in
       your HTML element tree.	The only methods that are of any real use in this degenerate element are push_content() and as_HTML().	The
       push_content() method will simply prepend the provided text to the current content.  If you happen to pass an HTML::element to
       push_content, the output of the as_HTML() method in that element will be prepended.

REQUIRES

       HTML::Element(3)

AUTHOR

       Matthew P. Sisk, <sisk@mojotoad.com>

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Matthew P. Sisk.  All rights reserved. All wrongs revenged. This program is free software; you can redistribute it
       and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO

       HTML::Element(3), HTML::ElementSuper(3), HTML::Element::Glob(3), HTML::ElementTable(3), perl(1).

perl v5.10.1							    2010-06-09						     HTML::ElementRaw(3pm)