Perl CGI : loosing values of $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} and $ENV{CONTENT

ramesh_ps1 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I am new to Perl CGI and I am having problem on with refreshing page.

I am using

<meta HTTP-EQUIV='REFRESH' content='10;url=/user/statusdisplay.cgi'> to refresh the page once every 10 seconds.

But on refreshing I am loosing few environment vareables like,

$ENV{CONTENT_LENGTH} is brcoming "0" and
$ENV{HTTP_REFERER} is not available.

I do have few checks in the begining of the script to determine the calling page and since $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} is not available on refresh some of my conditions fail and the application doesnot work properly.

Is there any alternate way to retain these values even on refresh?

Comment on Perl CGI : loosing values of $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} and $ENV{CONTENT_LENGTH} on refresh

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Re: Perl CGI : loosing values of $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} and $ENV{CONTENT_LENGTH} on refresh by Corion (Patriarch) on Sep 21, 2007 at 08:44 UTC
This is not really a "refresh" in the sense of pressing the "reload" button in your browser. The META tag issues a new GET request to `/user/statusdisplay.cgi`. If you want to remember values across the page loads, encode them into the target URL: `use strict; use CGI qw(:standard); use URI::Escape; my $referrer = escapeHTML(uri_escape($ENV{REFERRER})); print <<HTML <meta HTTP-EQUIV='REFRESH' content='10;url=/user/statusdisplay.cgi?ref +=$referrer'> HTML` [download] The `Content-Length` will be 0 because you don't get the data POSTed anymore. If you want to keep the data POSTed to your first script, you will need to store it locally and pass a hint to your refresh page.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re: Perl CGI : loosing values of $ENV{HTTP_REFERER} and $ENV{CONTENT_LENGTH} on refresh
by Corion (Patriarch) on Sep 21, 2007 at 08:44 UTC

This is not really a "refresh" in the sense of pressing the "reload" button in your browser. The META tag issues a new GET request to /user/statusdisplay.cgi. If you want to remember values across the page loads, encode them into the target URL:

use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use URI::Escape;

my $referrer = escapeHTML(uri_escape($ENV{REFERRER}));

print <<HTML
<meta HTTP-EQUIV='REFRESH' content='10;url=/user/statusdisplay.cgi?ref
+=$referrer'>
HTML
[download]

The Content-Length will be 0 because you don't get the data POSTed anymore. If you want to keep the data POSTed to your first script, you will need to store it locally and pass a hint to your refresh page.

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