Skip to Main Content
Perl in a Nutshell
book

Perl in a Nutshell

by Nathan Patwardhan, Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour
December 1998
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
674 pages
40h 41m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Perl in a Nutshell

Chapter 10. The CGI.pm Module

CGI.pm is a Perl module for creating and parsing CGI forms. It is distributed with core Perl as of Perl 5.004, but you can also retrieve CGI.pm from CPAN, and you can get the very latest version at any time from ftp://ftp-hygenome.wi.mit.edu/pub/software/WWW/.

CGI is an object-oriented module. Don’t let the object-oriented nature scare you off, though; CGI.pm is very easy to use, as evidenced by its overwhelming popularity among all levels of Perl programmers. To give you an idea of how easy it is to use CGI.pm, let’s take a scenario in which a user fills out and submits a form containing her birthday. Without CGI.pm, the script would have to translate the URL-encoded input by hand (probably using a series of regular expressions) and assign it to a variable. For example, you might try something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl # cgi script without CGI.pm $size_of_form_info = $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'}; read ($STDIN, $form_info, $size_of_form_info); # Split up each pair of key=value pairs foreach $pair (split (/&/, $form_info)) { # For each pair, split into $key and $value variables ($key, $value) = split (/=/, $pair); # Get rid of the pesky %xx encodings $key =~ s/%([\dA-Fa-f][\dA-Fa-f])/pack ("C", hex ($1))/eg; $value =~ s/%([\dA-Fa-f][\dA-Fa-f])/pack ("C", hex ($1))/eg; # Use $key as index for $parameters hash, $value as value $parameters{$key} = $value; } # Print out the obligatory content-type line print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n"; # Tell the user what ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Perl One-Liners

Perl One-Liners

Peteris Krumins
Beginning Perl

Beginning Perl

Curtis Ovid Poe
Mastering Perl

Mastering Perl

brian d foy
Perl Best Practices

Perl Best Practices

Damian Conway

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565922867Catalog PageErrata