Probably. Link to another program which reads the contents of the file in question and sends back whatever representation of said contents you desire.

And a reading of How (Not) To Ask A Question probably couldn't hurt.

The name ".dat" file tells me that the file format is not a standard format, but rather, a private format. So I cannot give you any details on how you must parse the file. You'll have to figure it out for yourself — or give more details.

<Files *.dat>
   ForceType text/plain
</Files>
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Untested.

ikegami :

 ...
 ForceType text/plain
 ...

Such solutions won't work if the document root
is away from the script path. There won't be any
allowed accesses into /cgi-bin/ without extra configuration
(which you don't really want to do this way).

You won't get around sth. in the lines of this: Re: Viewing .dat files

Regards

mwa

If ScriptAlias causes problems with ForceType, a more sensible solution would be to put the .dat in another directory rather than breaking caching, HEAD requests, conditional requests, partial requests, etc by reimplementing the wheel.

I particularly like how your script checks if a file exists but returns 200 OK either way.

If you write your file with a .txt extension—rather than a .dat extension—then the browser will render it as text. No need to fool around with another program interpreting and reformatting it.

Just link to it in the normal way:

  Here's my <a href="frob.txt"> data</a>!
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#!/usr/bin/perl
# [plain] (no extension)
# dump some /cgi-bin/ (or other) file in plaintext mode
# 1) file must be in the same dir as script
# 2) server has to provide PATH_INFO
# 3) call with: http://my.server.org/cgi-bin/plain/textfile.dat
#    if 'plain' is the scripts name
#
 my ($fn) = $ENV{SCRIPT_FILENAME} =~ /(.+?)[^\/]+$/g;
 $fn .= $1 if $ENV{PATH_INFO} =~ /([^\/]+)$/;
 print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

 if( -f $fn ) {
    open my $fh, '<', $fn or warn "$!";
    local $/;
    print <$fh>
 }
 else {
    print "($fn not found)\n"
 }
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