Ok,
Essentially I am trying to read a file into an array, and
then display the contents of the array inside the text box.
My eventual goal is to display XML text from a file in the text area.
here is the code I am using: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(warningsToBrowser fatalsToBrowser);

my $cgi = new CGI;

print $cgi->header();
print $cgi->start_html('My test text box');
print $cgi->startform;
open my $FHIN, '<', "./test.file" || die "$!";
my @fhin = <$FHIN>;
print $cgi->textarea(   -name=>'TEXT_AREA',
                        -default=>"@fhin");
print "<textarea> @fhin </textarea>";
print $cgi->end_html();

[download]


this produces two empty text boxes. running this from the command line results in: 
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE html
    PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-U
+S">
<head>
<title>My test text box</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
+" />
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="http://localhost" enctype="application/x-w
+ww-form-urlencoded">
<textarea name="TEXT_AREA" >this is a test file
 this is line two
 three
 4
 foo bar
 six
</textarea><textarea> this is a test file
 this is line two
 three
 4
 foo bar
 six
 </textarea>
</body>

[download]
So I know the text is being read into the array. But looking at the source of the page shows no text is being passed: 
<!DOCTYPE html
    PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-U
+S">
<head>
<title>My test text box</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
+" />
</head>
<body>
<form method="post" action="/cgi-bin/cfg_edit.cgi" enctype="applicatio
+n/x-www-form-urlencoded">
<textarea name="TEXT_AREA" ></textarea><textarea> </textarea>
</body>
</html>

[download]

and this is the contents of my test.file: 
this is a test file
this is line two
three
4
foo bar
six

[download]

In reply to Re: Perl CGI Text box by PyrexKidd
in thread Perl CGI Text box by PyrexKidd

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.