html::htmldoc not working

divinafaudan has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I am really confuse why does my codes did not work when tried to run it from the browser.However, it works perfectly when run from the command line. Please see my codes below

#!/usr/bin/perl5

use HTML::HTMLDoc;
use strict;
use warnings;

use CGI;
my $cgi=new CGI;
print $cgi->header( -type => 'application/pdf' );

my $htmldoc = new HTML::HTMLDoc();

$htmldoc->set_html_content(qq~<html><body><table border=1><tr><td cols
+pan=2>A PDF file</td></tr><tr><td>Column 1</td><td><img src='freight-
+charge.jpg'></td></tr></table></body></html>~);
# $htmldoc->set_input_file($filename); # alternative to use a present 
+file from your fs

my $pdf = $htmldoc->generate_pdf();

print $pdf->to_string();
$pdf->to_file('foo.pdf');
[download]

I am getting no error, when i compiled it, the syntax is OK. Please help

Comment on html::htmldoc not working Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: html::htmldoc not working by choroba (Cardinal) on Aug 01, 2013 at 15:22 UTC
CGI scripts are usually run as a different user (`www-data` etc.) HTML::HTMLDoc uses an external programme, `htmldoc`. Are you sure this user has permissions to run it? What do the logfiles say? لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: html::htmldoc not working by divinafaudan (Initiate) on Aug 01, 2013 at 17:15 UTC
Thanks for your reply. I guess the user has permission to run the program because the file was set to 777 mode and the program able to generate the pdf with 0 bytes. I forgot to mention in my last post that the program generated pdf,and, the problem is it did not write the pdf content.	[reply]
Re^3: html::htmldoc not working by choroba (Cardinal) on Aug 02, 2013 at 13:31 UTC
I did not mean your script, but the htmldoc programme (use `type htmldoc` [download] in a shell to find its location). لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ	[reply] [d/l]
Re: html::htmldoc not working by rpnoble419 (Pilgrim) on Aug 01, 2013 at 20:07 UTC
You are not passing the name of the PDF file back to the browser to open. You may want to try adding this as the last line of your file `print $cgi->redirect('foo.pdf');` [download] You will need to remove the print $cgi->header for the redirect to work...	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: html::htmldoc not working by divinafaudan (Initiate) on Aug 02, 2013 at 13:18 UTC
Thanks for your reply but do redirection did not solve the issue. Do you have any other idea? I do not need to open the pdf file from the browser, I just want to create the pdf file and able to write on it. But I do appreciate your help, really.	[reply]
Re: html::htmldoc not working by glasswalk3r (Friar) on Aug 02, 2013 at 21:30 UTC
I think you should just quit using HTML::HTMLDoc in a CGI environment: you will need to fork from the web server and that is never good, both for performance and security. I cannot give a suggestion about what to look for in CPAN, but probably there are modules there to write PDF without the need to `fork`. Alceu Rodrigues de Freitas Junior --------------------------------- "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Sir Winston Churchill	[reply] [d/l]