in reply to emailing with an address taken from a database

Many thanks for your responses, steves and fuzzyping.
The while statement was plain wrong - no hidden agenda there! (in fact there's no hidden agenda about any of this(:). I've now got:

my $Email_address;

my ($Password,$U_Timestamp,$three,$four,$skipthisfield);
my  $data="/path/data/edit/data.txt";

open (FILE, "$data");

while (my $line =<FILE>) {
    ($Password,$U_Timestamp,$three,$four,$skipthisfield) = split "\t",
+$line;
     if ($id_in eq $three) { 
     $Email_address eq $four;
     last;  
    } 
    }

[download]
which seems to me to be much more direct.

$four holds the email address in the file which is to be extracted: the format of the email address me@my.com

I'm afraid that on this rented server space I don't have access to error logs so I'm still somewhat baffled as to why the email isn't getting transmitted.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: emailing with an address taken from a database
by steves (Curate) on Feb 11, 2003 at 14:09 UTC

    This line: 

    $Email_address eq $four;

    [download]
    should read: 
    $Email_address = $four;

    [download]
    eq is for string comparison. = is used for all scalar assignments.

    I'd also add error checking to the open call: 

    open (FILE, "$data") or die "Failed to open $data: $!\n";

    [download]

    You need to find some way to see debugging output. The original code had debug statements going to the browser. Do those work? If so, I'd start adding some debugging so you can get an idea where things are going wrong. It will be hard to pinpoint without the ability to debug.

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Darn it! I had the $Email_address = $four; and then changed it just before posting - thanks for pointing it out.

      I tried adding debugging and just inserted a print "Email_address"; further down the script and decided I would get rid of the subroutine element and the (check=) statements just to try to simplify it.
      Immediately I received an email generated from the script! Progress, but it comes with befuddlement!!. what I have now is: 
      #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI;
my $query = new CGI;


my $thisurl = "http://www.my_site.com/cgi-bin/email.pl";




my  $id_in=$query->param('id_in');
my  $Guest_Email=$query->param('Guest_Email');
my  $check=$query->param('check');
my $Email_address;

my ($Password,$U_Timestamp,$three,$four,$skipthisfield);
my @emailer = ();
my  $data="/path/data/edit/data.txt";

open (FILE, "$data");

while (my $line =<FILE>) {
    ($Password,$U_Timestamp,$three,$four,$skipthisfield) = split "\t",
+$line;
     if ($id_in eq $three) { 
     $Email_address = $four;
     last;  
    } 
    }





print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";






my $sendmailer;
my $emailto;
my $emailfrom;
my $message_no;
my $message;


$sendmailer="/usr/sbin/sendmail";



    $emailto="$Email_address";


$emailfrom="enquiry\@my_site.com";

print "Email is: $Email_address";

open (MAIL, "| $sendmailer -t") || die "sendmailer: $!";
print MAIL "To: $emailto\n";
print MAIL "From: $emailfrom\n";
print MAIL "Subject: Request for information\n";
print MAIL "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print MAIL "<html><body><p>\n";
print MAIL "<font size=\"2\" color=\"#CC0000\">\n";
print MAIL "<u>REQUEST FOR INFORMATION</u><BR><BR>\n";
print MAIL "I am interested in receiving information on : $id_in<BR>\n
+";
print MAIL "blah\n";
print MAIL "Any other comments:<BR>\n";
print MAIL "$message<br>\n";
print MAIL "</font></body></html>\n";
last;
close(MAIL);
close(MAIL);

      [download]
      Any ideas why it should work like that but not in the previous version? (At least this gives me a basis to start looking but there might be something obvious which I'm not getting).
[reply]
[d/l]
        Well, I have done some research, and the whole script works well including if (check=0) conditionals provided the sub routine aspect is removed! I don't know why. Perhaps someone could tell me?

        Thanks for the input so far

[reply]

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