"...effing..."

Some hints for the uninitiated:

• Thomas Effing
• In plain terms

Best regards, Karl

«The Crux of the Biscuit is the Apostrophe»

perl -MCrypt::CBC -E 'say Crypt::CBC->new(-key=>'kgb',-cipher=>"Blowfish")->decrypt_hex($ENV{KARL});'Help

use strict; use warnings; 
use CGI; 

my $q = new CGI;

my $firstname = $q->param('firstname') || '';
my $lastname = $q->param('surname')    || '';
my $cars     = $q->param('cars')       || '';

#too funny .... https://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_option_selected.asp

#$cars='volvo';
print qq|content-type: text/html\n\n|;

print qq|<form action="$ENV{SCRIPT_NAME}" method="post">\n|;
print qq|<input name="firstname" type="text" value="$firstname"/><hr/>
+|;
print qq|<input name="surname"   type="text" value="$lastname"/><hr/>|
+;

print "\n"; 
print qq|<select name="cars" >|,"\n";
my @carlist; 
push @carlist,["volvo","Volvo"]; 
push @carlist,["saab","Saab"]; 
push @carlist,["fiat","Fiat"]; 
push @carlist,["audi","Audi"]; 
for my $cl (@carlist) { 
  my $selected= $cars eq $cl->[0]?'selected ':''; 
  print '  ',qq|<option |,$selected,qq|value="|,$cl->[0],qq|">|,$cl->[
+1],qq|</option>|,"\n";
  } 
print qq|</select>|,"\n";

print qq|<input type="submit" name="form_submit" value="go">|;
[download]

way too funny...

<form action="" method="post" name="myform">
<select name="cars" onchange='myform.submit()'>
  <option value=""></option>
  <option value="volvo">Volvo</option>
  <option value="saab">Saab</option>
  <option value="fiat">Fiat</option>
  <option value="audi">Audi</option>
</select>
</form>
[download]

You could link the submit action to the onChange event with JavaScript as poj showed you, but that means that even if the user selects the wrong item by accident, your program will submit the selected value. Lol A better way is to include a submit button as huck showed you in his example. So, the user should pick an item from the list and then should press "Submit" to submit the values to the perl script.

The second mistake is that the <SELECT> tag should not have VALUE="" defined in it! If you want a default item selected already when the user loads the page, you can achieve that by doing this. CORRECT WAY:

<select name="cars">
<option value="volvo">Volvo
<option value="saab" SELECTED>Saab
<option value="fiat">Fiat
<option value="audi">Audi
</select>

(Shh!! I'm just whispering to your ear: The closing tag for </OPTION> is also totally unnecessary.)