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

Hi everyone! I am trying to use CGI for the first time and I am wondering what it is I have to do to have the value of a large text box sent to a CGI script where it can be parsed and place each line in an array element. I would like it so that each line of the text box starts with a directory.
Example:
/vobs/multimedia
/vobs/testdirectory
this would write each line into a two element array. Right now I have my program reading from a text file into an array with 
open (READ_BR, "br_sample.txt") or
die ("Unable to open br_sample.txt!\n");
my @BR_paths = <READ_BR>;
chomp @BR_paths;
close (READ_BR);

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But I am unsure of how to get the value of the form into the CGI script. I hope this makes sense. Thanks in advance!

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: use CGI Question
by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 24, 2008 at 15:35 UTC
    Use CGI and its param() method to retrieve the text. See also the Tutorials section on this site.
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Re: use CGI Question
by olus (Curate) on Jul 24, 2008 at 16:00 UTC

    Sample code

    use CGI;

my $query = new CGI;

my $long_text_field = $query->param('long_text_field');

my @BR_paths = split /\n/, $long_text_field;

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[d/l]
      Minor nit.

      A textarea comes in with carriage return/line feed pairs.

      /\n/ will leave the carriage returns behind (on windows and nix). It may be better to use /\r\n/ instead. 

      #!c:/perl/bin/perl.exe

use strict;
use warnings;

use CGI;
my $q = CGI->new;

#my @lines  = split /\n/, $q->param(q{txt_area});
my @lines = split /\r\n/, $q->param(q{txt_area});

print $q->header;
print qq{*$_*} for @lines;

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      <html>
  <head>
    <title>textarea test</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <form name = "txt_area_form" action  = "/z/bin/test_form.cgi">
      <textarea name = "txt_area" rows = "3" cols = "10"></textarea>
      <input type = "submit">   
    </form>
  </body>
</html>

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      /\r\n/ produces 
      *one**two**three*

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      and /\n/ gives 
      *one **two **three*

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      i.e. the carriage returns are still lurking waiting to bite you later on. :-)
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[d/l]
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