Re: Writing a simple posting script which can be used via the web

You don't fully explain all the details, but here are some suggestions - I'm sure you'll get lots more too from more learned monks.

Use Strict - see perlman:lib:strict - Basically it will help avoid typos, and other silly errors that bite you when you least expect them.
Turn -w on - see perlman:lib:warn - Helps you track down lots of errors
Turn -T. You can't trust user input, and on a server, you have to be doubly sure that they are inputting what you want them to.
Go and look at the perlman:lib:CGI module, it will save you so much pain to use this, it's the stanard way of doing all things CGI. For reasons why you should do this see use CGI or die; amongst others.

Starting from the above you can get rid of most of your CGI parsing code which will make your script a lot easier to work with. Your script will start to look more like:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
# news.pl

use Strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);
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Now that you have done that, the CGI moudule will take care of all your form processing, for example to put the value of the foo paramater into a variable you can use: my $bar = param("foo"); much easier than doing it yourself.

CGI also handles the output too, so to print the HTTP header, and your HTML you can now do something more like:

print header(),
      start_html,
      hr, h1("Heading"), hr,
      end_html;
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and this will send the following to the browser:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML Basic 1.0//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-basic/xhtml-basic10.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US"><head><title>U
+ntitled Document</title&gt;
</head><body><hr /><h1>Heading</h1><hr /></body></html>
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This will no doubt make your life a lot easier... If you want to find out more, browse this site you may wish to look at some of the books in the Book Reviews section, have a look at Writing CGI Applications with Perl amongst others.

Anyhow my comments are a small start, others will no doubt add more.

Good luck.

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