Flat-File

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

I wanted to know if I need to save the flat file as a txt or html document. Would I then put that into a cgi-bin or not. Also, I have tried saving this as a CGI program but does not seem to work. I have also tried saving it as a PL document. Any help would be great.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

my $in;
if ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq "GET") {
    $in = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};
} else {
    $in = <STDIN>;
}

$in =~ s/\+/ /g;
$in =~ s/%(..)/pack("c",hex($1))/ge;
my %movie = split (/=/, $in);

open (DATA, "/home/export/users/cis14/cheu0576631/public_html/cgi-bin/
+MovieList.txt");
my @data = <DATA>;
close (DATA);

print <<END;
Content-Type: text/html\n\n

<html>
<body bgcolor="#000000" text="#ffffff">
<center><h2>Results</h2></center><p>
<center><hr size=1 width=50%></center>
END

for ($i = 0; $i <= $#data; $i++) {
    if ($data[$i] =~ /-- $movie{'title'} --/i) {
        print <<END;
<center><b><font size="+1">$data[$i + 1]</font></b></center><br>
$data[$i + 2]<br>
END
        last;
    } elsif ($i == $#data) {
        print "<b><i>Sorry! I haven't reviewed that one yet!</i></b>";
    }
}

print <<END;
<center><hr size=1 width=50%></center>
</body>
</html>
END
[download]

Comment on Flat-File Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Flat-File by Zaxo (Archbishop) on Nov 22, 2003 at 06:04 UTC
You would do much better to `use CGI;` and take advantage of the `param()` method for figuring out the request. On the lost file, you should decide the absolute location of the file and make sure that's what you're looking at. After Compline, Zaxo	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Flat-File by l3nz (Friar) on Nov 22, 2003 at 07:22 UTC
I'd use the CGI modules too, because they are way better suited to what you are about to do. In any case, I would not try writing to the CGI-BIN directory (this might be a security hole) but I'd ask my sysadmin for a directory I can read and write to. In your code, I think it's useless to read all the lines of the movie database up front; I'd read wwhile I find the movie I'm interested in and skip the rest.	[reply]
Re: Flat-File by CountZero (Bishop) on Nov 22, 2003 at 13:45 UTC
What do you mean with "does not seem to work"? "It doesn't run at all" or "It runs but it doesn't do what I want it to do" There is a world of difference between the two and before we can even think of offering any help, some more info would be helpful. Remark: this is another question related to searching a movie database (see Help with Perl movie database engine assignment). Homework? CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]