Beginning Perl & Forms

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

Sorry for that first mess. I didn't know this was an HTML window.

I patched this example together as a very simple program that is supposed to take the output from a form and produce another form with the parsed apart form entries. But it only returns a blank form. Am I missing something?

NOTE: I am using a GTE sponsered web site and they told me I needed the first 3 lines exactly as shown. At least when I followed this the "internal server" error went away and I at least saw a blank form returned.

I am an experienced C++ and VB programmer, but Perl is brand new to me. And comments are welcomed. Here it is, with the (code) tags this time.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use CGI qw(:cgi-lib :standard);
print header();

# geturl.pl

#
# A little Perl script to read, decode and print the names
# and values passed to it from an HTML Form thru CGI.

# Get the HTML header, ender, define the page title.

require "/cgi-local";    # full path

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

$Title = "Get Information From a URL";

# Get the query string

# $QueryString = $ENV{'QUERY_STRING'};

# Use split to make an array of name-value pairs broken at
# the ampersand char.

@NameValuePairs = split (/&/, $QueryString);

# Put up an HTML header, page title, and a rule.

&HTML_Header ($Title);

print "<BODY>\n";

print "<H1>$Title</H1>\n";

print "<HR>\n";

# Split each of the name-value pairs and print them on the page.

foreach $NameValue (@NameValuePairs)
    {
    ($Name, $Value) = split (/=/, $NameValue);
    print "Name = $Name, Value = $Value<BR>\n";
    }

&HTML_Ender;
[download]

Comment on Beginning Perl & Forms - 2 Download Code

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Re: Beginning Perl & Forms - 2 by hotyopa (Scribe) on Jan 19, 2001 at 03:27 UTC
Make sure you have a look at the CGI man page, the documentation is pretty thorough and easy to follow. Also have a look at Carp- it replaces those horrible HTTP 500 errors with something a little more useful. The following script should do what you want though (and hopefully point you in the right direction): #!/usr/bin/perl -wT use CGI; use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser); #makes any error messages appear in + the browser $query = new CGI; #instantiates new CGI object @params = $query->param; #fetches names of all parameters passed to +the script print $query->header,$query->start_html('Show Params'); #prints h +ttp header, html tags up to <body> #loop through the list of parameters and print each out on #a separate line. foreach $parameter(@params) { print $parameter, ": ", $query->param($parameter), $query->br; } print $query->end_html; [download] ~-}hotyopa{-~	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Beginning Perl & Forms - 2 by wardk (Deacon) on Jan 19, 2001 at 03:08 UTC
the second line indicates that you have access to CGI.pm. So you have alot of power to manage html forms at your fingertips. You should avoid using the cgi-lib functions (just leave the :standard) that is included as backwards-compatibility with the older cgi-lib. Do some searching for CGI.pm, here is the manual CGI.pm a simple seach here for CGI.pm should give you more than enough information to get rolling. good luck!	[reply]