Reading file uploads

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

I have a web host that doesn't have the CGI-LIB module (maybe for security reasons that I saw mentioned at http://www.rice.edu/perl4lib/archives/2000-03/msg00022.html ), and I'm trying to read an uploaded file submitted by a form. I can read non-uploaded data from the form using the CGI module, but for some reason, the following doesn't print out the uploaded data:

from form:

<html><body>
<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="path_to_script_that_reads_
+non_uploaded_
data_only_for_some_reason"  method="post">

<p>Upload test<input type="file" size="45" name="UploadedFile"></p>

<input type="submit" value="Submit">      
<input type="reset" value="Reset">
</form></body></html>
[download]

from script:

use CGI;
$CGI::POST_MAX = 4000;
$CGI::MULTIPART; ### Doesn't seem to be needed in script for reading f
+orm data,
but I put it here in desperation
$fdata = CGI->new();
$Test_Field = $fdata->param('UploadedFile');
print"$Test_Field";exit;
[download]

Seems like it should at least print out the file name, but it doesn't. I might try to create the file upload part of the form from the script, but I already have a HTML form for the other fields, so I'd like stick with all HTML.

I read that LWP can be used for this. Must I figure out how to do that, or is there some way I can fix the above script and just use the plain old CGI module?

In another experiment, I used the script at http://www.speakeasy.org/~cgires/cgi-tour.html#summary which is a modified version of CGI_LIB, but it's old and didn't work on a plain text file at all, and garbled a cgi script that I tried uploading. I might try rewriting the parsing routine in that script, but it seems like a long, sloppy way to handle this, especially since it's only for one form field.

Any suggestions?

Comment on Reading file uploads Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Reading file uploads by benn (Vicar) on Apr 24, 2003 at 23:13 UTC
Your CGI code looks ok in principle, and is definitely the way to do it - as recently explained at length elsewhere, LWP is a module for retrieving pages, not from creating them and dealing with their submissions. This may be simply to do with exactly where you're running the script from and printing the result...if you're submitting from a browser, and want the script to print back to the browser, you'll need to stick a `print $fdata->header()` before that print statement, so that the browser will be able to display the result. Cheers, Ben	[reply] [d/l]
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