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I'll try to answer your question, but first a few curmudgeonly comments:

From your node title, it sounds like you may be making a classic new CGI programmer's thought error. You are not coding a continuous process. Each request your CGI script gets runs as a separate, unique invokation of your script. The last person I taught CGI scripting had to be reminded of this fact about 1000 times before she got it.
Be very careful taking filenames as input from a cgi. There are many nodes about this. Check out ovid's cgi tutorial for a treatment of this. Also read perlsec.

Are you familiar with the state machine model of CGI programming? (Try a Super Search for "state machine" more info.) The idea is that your CGI script needs a way to remember what part of the interactive process it is presenting.

Your script would probably have three states, let's call them "edit", "preview", and "commit".

edit: The edit state should be the defualt state. The script will present a form for the user to fill out. Pressing submit will request that the script is run as preview.
preview: This state can lead to either edit or commit. It should print the user's responses to the form in an easy to read format.
commit: Writes the file and displays a message, like "file foo saved" probably has a link back to the edit state.

# Set state to edit if not defined.
param(state)||param(name=>'state', value=>'edit');

if (param('state') eq 'edit')
{   # display the form
    print start_form('POST',self_url());
    # blah blah blah
    print submit('state','preview'), end_form();
} elsif (param('state' eq 'preview')
{   # display the results, prettily.
    print start_form('POST',self_url()),
          # A bunch of hidden fields to pass our data along
          hidden(parameter-n, value),
          # This button commits the data to a file.
          submit('state','commit'), 
          # This button returns to the edit form, to make changes.
          submit('state','edit'), 
          end_form();
} elsif ( param('state') eq 'commit')
{    # Save the file
     # Print some nice messages.
} else
{   # General purpose error.  You should never wind up here
    # Trap it just in case.
}
[download]

I personally, prefer to use here docs for embedding HTML in my perl. I find CGI.pm's HTML generation cumbersome. But some people really like it, TIMTOWTDI. I always use CGI.pm for parameter management though.

 # A sample here doc
print <<"END_OF_HTML";
Blah laalbalalsdfasdf
asdf
blaha
END_OF_HTML
[download]

TGI says moo

In reply to Re: Why is my CGI.pm script trying to assign data before pressing submit. by TGI
in thread Why is my CGI.pm script trying to assign data before pressing submit. by dru145

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