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

I'm trying to get my CGI program to send certain information when you click on a link. It has to set a couple of variables, and then submit the information to the next CGI script. The only way I know of is by using Javascript, in this awfully messy way: 
print '
<form name="theform" action="page2.cgi" method="post">
<input type=hidden name=x>
<input type=hidden name=y>
</form>
<a href=javascript:document.theform.x.value=5;
javascript:document.theform.y.value=7;
javascript:document.theform.submit();>
hello<\/a>
';

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Is there a cleverer way to do this?
I also, if you pardon the heresy, tried doing it with PHP and session variables, but I couldn't figure out any way to get that working either.

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Re: CGI question
by Corion (Patriarch) on Feb 16, 2010 at 09:47 UTC

    If your target accepts GET requests, you can simply issue a 302 redirect to send the user to their target location, see CGI on the redirect method.

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[d/l]
      Oh right, I forgot to mention that. I could use a "get" instead, but that's inconvenient for other reasons. The user might input completely different values of x and y and mess things up. So I think it has to be "post".
[reply]

        The user can also put in completely different values for X and Y in a POST request. If you want real security, either fetch the results on behalf of the user yourself, and output them to the user (using LWP::UserAgent), or store the data in a session and pick up the data in the target from that session.

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