#no space
print $query->textfield('foo').$query->textfield('bar');

#space
print $query->textfield('foo').' '.$query->textfield('bar');
[download]

Here's the fishing rod: the dot operator concatenates strings. In the second example, Masem is concatenating the first variable with a space with the second variable.

# Get rid of the ' ', if you do not want the space.
print $query->param('foo), ' ', $query->param('bar');
[download]

according to some quick and dirty Benchmarking, which is always suspicious, is just a teensy bit quicker. Apparently the difference in speed grows as the length of the strings grows as well as the number of strings being utilized grows. As well at some point the join routine becomes more efficient than a string of '.' operators.

You seem to be a bit confused about how all the parts fit together. Your code is really CGI.pm perl pidgin HTML.

The plain old HTML would look something more like:

<FORM METHOD="POST"  ACTION="foo.cgi">
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="foo"><P>
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="bar">
<INPUT TYPE="submit">
</FORM>
[download]

The HTML could either be generated by a script or reside in a static file somwhere.

Here's some code that prints a form and any results of previous submits. I didn't list a form action, becuase it defaults to the page it reside in.

#!perl

use CGI;
use strict;

my $q = new CGI;
print $q->header(), 
      $q->start_html(), 
      $q->h1('Print some input.'),
      $q->startform(),
      $q->textfield('foo'),
      $q->p(),
      $q->textfield('bar'),
      $q->submit(),
      $q->endform();
      
# Print w/ space
print $q->param('foo').' '.$q->param('bar');  # You can't use "" to in
+terpolate param(), it's a function call, not a variable.
print $q->p();

# Print w/o space
print $q->param('foo').$q->param('bar');

print $q->end_html;
[download]

TGI says moo

correct, I posted the part of the cgi that created the html that made the form. it also appears that I can use a comma or a period according to the posts that I have received from others

Stuffy

The comma operator (,) acts as a list separator. When you feed print and bunch of stuff with commas in-between you are saying print this list of things. In a scalar context the comma evaluates the left arg and dumps the value, then it evaluates the right arg and returns the result.print scalar('foo','bar','this'); gets you this

The period (.) is the string concatenation operator. It combines strings. It also wants its operands in scalar context.

$a = 'abc';
$d = 'def';
$A = $a.$b; #ie, $A='abcdef'
print $A.$a.$b;
[download]

This code prints abcdefabcdef. Here I say print this one thing that you can make by putting these things together.

Though they seem to do much the same thing when you're printing, they are actually quite different. Watch out for the scalars only aspect of .!


TGI says moo

use Strict;
use CGI;

my $myCGI = new CGI;

my $withSpace = $myCGI->param('foo') . ' ' . $myCGI->param('bar');
my $withoutSpace = $myCGI->param('foo') . $myCGI->param('bar');

print "With Space \t $withSpace \n";
print "Without Space \t $withoutSpace";
[download]

#!/usr/bin/perl

use CGI;
use CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser';
CGI::ReadParse(*in);

$foo = $in{'name_of_first_field'};
$bar = $in{'name_of_second_field'};

$withspace = "${foo}${bar}";
$withoutspace = "$foo $bar";
[download]

print "$withspace\n";
print "$withoutspace\n";
[download]

#!/jpsama/bin/perl -w
$tks = `mount`;
$jpsama = $! if $!;
print $jpsama;