win95progman has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I have a form with three submit buttons on it. Can someone tell me how to tell which button was pressed within my script? Thanks in advance, Tom.

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Re: form buttons
by stefan k (Curate) on Nov 30, 2001 at 15:09 UTC
    Usually you give your submit button a value and a name: 
    <input type="submit" name="action" value="Search">
<input type="submit" name="action" value="Logout">

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    and if you 
    use CGI;

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    you can then test for what action to do: 
    if (param("action") eq "Search") {
   # ...
}
# ...

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    Please take into account that this comes from the back of my head and I have not been doing CGIs for more than a year now; still it should be correct.

    Regards... Stefan
    you begin bashing the string with a +42 regexp of confusion

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Re: form buttons
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 30, 2001 at 15:12 UTC
    Give all the buttons the same name but different values. 
    <input type="submit" name="action" value="button1">
<input type="submit" name="action" value="button2">
<input type="submit" name="action" value="button3">

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    Then in your CGI the action parameter will be 'button1' or 'button2' or 'button3' depending on which is pressed. 
    my $query = CGI::new();
#assign value to $action
my $action = $query->param('action');

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    you can then say 
    if ($action eq 'button1') {
#do your thing
}elsif ($action eq 'button2'){
#do another thing
}

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Re: form buttons
by kwoff (Friar) on Nov 30, 2001 at 20:09 UTC
    Also, sometimes you want to separate the buttons in different <FORM> sections.
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