print start_html(-head=>meta({-http_equiv => 'Content-Type',
                              -content    => 'text/xml'}))
[download]

Someone please correct me if I am wrong.

Hi been42

That is exactly what I am looking to do. I tried your start_html but it just returns a time stamp to the browser. Am I missing something more fundemental? I'm a bit of a CGI novie, but here is what I have so far:

optput:Mon Feb 19 21:34:25 2007 processremote.cgi: readline() on closed filehandle XMLFILE at /my/upload/path/processremote.cgi line 15.



#!/usr/bin/perl
          
use strict; 
use warnings; 
use CGI qw(:standard); 
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); 

print header; 
print start_html(-head=>meta({-http_equiv => 'Content-Type',
                              -content    => 'text/xml'}));

open(XMLFILE, "/my/upload/path/master.xml"); 

while (<XMLFILE>){ 
   print $_;
}
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Two things:
1. If you know you want to output xml, then print header('text/xml'); is a lot simpler.
2. Always check to see if your 'open' succeeded. Your error message means that your script didn't open the file.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

print header('text/xml');
my $file = "/some/file.xml";
open(XMLFILE, $file) or die "Failed to open $file, $!";
while (<XMLFILE>){
   print;
}
[download]

Please make sure whether you have "master.xml" in the specified location.
Use the below code.


open(XMLFILE, "/my/upload/path/master.xml") or die("Can't open  file m
+aster.xml : $!");
[download]

also its best practice to close the filehandle after the usage.

close(XMLFILE)
[download]

You need a real HTTP header, http-equiv is:

• only applicable to HTML documents
• can't specify content-type in a way that anything other than Russian Apache will care about

The CGI.pm docs explain how to create standard http headers.

Here are two options:

1. send the xml to the browser, and let the browser render it:

   use CGI qw(:cgi); # don't need HTML, only cgi stuff
   print header(-type => 'application/xml');  # make browser expect xml
   open XML, '<', 'foo.xml' or die $!;
   print while <XML>;
   

2. print an HTML rendering of your xml file:

   use CGI qw(:standard);
   sub escape_xml ($) {
     my $text = shift;
     $text =~ s/</&lt;/g;
     $text =~ s/ < >/&gt;/g;
     return $text;
   }
   print header, start_html('XML File');
   open XML, '<', 'foo.xml' or die $!;
   print "<pre>\n";
   print escape_xml($_) while <XML>;
   print "\n</pre>";
   

Perfect! Thank you all, I have it working!

Nice. I like your coding style, odrm. But, it looks like you've got a copy-paste error in part 2. (s/</&gt;/g should be s/>/&gt;/g, yes?)

Well spotted - yes it should be. I know why I prefer having perl do my escaping, over doing it by hand!

Which setup are you using, i.e. which webserver, browser...? In case you're using Firefox, there's a nifty little extension LiveHTTPHeaders that allows you to watch which HTTP headers are being exchanged between browser and webserver.

If that doesn't help you to debug the "bad header" issue yourself, just post the respective headers that LiveHTTPHeaders (or some similar tool for your browser) is reporting.

The print header('text/xml'); suggested by virtualsue works fine for me (using Apache / Firefox), so I suppose your problem is no longer related to the script code itself...