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

Hello fellow perlers, got a question for ya. I'am trying to make a generic form submission thingy (like the subject suggested). I do not wanna use any modules and stuff, i have a form decoder snippet and it goes like this...

---------------------------------------------------
read(STDIN, $buffer, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'});
@pairs = split(/&/, $buffer);

foreach $pair (@pairs) {
($name, $value) = split(/=/, $pair);
   $value =~ tr/+/ /;
   $value =~ s/%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])/pack("C", hex($1))/eg;
   $value =~ s/&/&/g;
   $value =~ s/"/"/g;
   $value =~ s/</</g;
   $value =~ s/>/>/g;
    $FORM{$name} = $value;
}
----------------------------------------------------

Then i loop all the form-element that is submitted like...
-----------------------------------------
foreach $key (keys %FORM) {
  print "Want to save : [$FORM{$key}]<br>\n";
}
-----------------------------------------

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But i cannot distinguish each form-input... how do i get a name for each element. I would like it to be something like
form{'elementname','value'}

Would this be possible?

Regards KrYo

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
RE: Generic Form thingy
by turnstep (Parson) on Mar 29, 2000 at 19:00 UTC

    Well, first of all your code looks funny, but I think it may be because your characters were unescaped.

    $value =~ s/"/"/g; 
should be 
$value =~ s/"/&quot;/g;
and the same for the ampersand, less than, and greater than.

    The name for each element is, in your example, "$key"

    So to rewrite the last bit of code a bit:

    for $key (keys %FORM) {
  print "The name $key has the value $FORM{$key}\n";
}

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Re: Generic Form thingy
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Mar 29, 2000 at 20:28 UTC
    I'm not sure I understand your question. Are you asking for a data structure where you can access the element name by the value and vice versa?

    Or do you want an easy way to get the names of all form elements passed to your script? That's easy: my @elements = keys %FORM; Your assignment: $FORM{$name} = $value; sets up a good data structure for you already. All you have to do is treat %FORM like a normal hash (which it is). If you want the value of element 'color', do: my $color = $FORM{'color'}; Does that make sense? (By the way, you don't have to fear using CGI, as that module is included with the core distribution of any properly installed modern version of Perl.)

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Re: Generic Form thingy
by btrott (Parson) on Mar 29, 2000 at 22:03 UTC
    Like the other posters, I'm not absolutely sure what you're asking. But I thought I'd just guess and ask: do you have multiple form inputs with the same name, and you want your script to recognize that? (Where currently the script would just be overwriting the previous values each time through the loop). If so, I really highly suggest using CGI.pm, as it handles this quite nicely.

    If you must do it yourself, think about using a slightly different data structure. For example, have the values in your hash be array references instead of scalar values. Then in the array you can hold as many multiple values as you want.

    On the whole, though, this may not have been what you were asking, and if it was, my first recommendation would be to use CGI.pm.

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RE: Generic Form thingy
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 29, 2000 at 22:16 UTC
    Why re-invent the wheel? perldoc CGI
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      Yea you all understood, i got it working (sorry fot the late reply). It was like the first "replyer" said 
      
foreach $key (keys %FORM){
    #$key is now the name of the submitted formelement.
    #$FORM{$key} represents it's value
}

      [download]
      Well... that's that... i wonder tho' where can i find information on the pros _and_ cons about using cgi.pm, i haven't had the time to read all about it yet but i will.
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