directory Content Drop-down

[lisaw]

Hello, I am wondering if anyone know how to create a drop-down that will contain the contents of a certain directory without the need for a db? This is mainly for image selection. thanks!

[moxliukas]

Could you give us a bit more details? Is this for GUI application with Perl/Tk or HTML/CGI?

I am not familiar with Perl/Tk, but in HTML you can use <SELECT> tag to do this kind of thing (there is also a CGI.pm function that builds this drop down list)

You can read the directory using functions opendir, readdir and closedir to get the file names

[valdez]

Why do you need to read the content of a directory using a db? It is possible to read directories using command opendir:

opendir DIR, $dir;
while ($file = readdir DIR) {
    if ($file =~ /\.jpg$/) {
        push @images, { 'image' => $file };
    }
}
closedir DIR;

I didn't understand what kind of drop-down thingy you need :) drop-down menus? HTML? Tk? I know only some HTML and here is what I would do using HTML::Template:

use HTML::Template;

$t = HTML::Template->new(filename => 'dropdown.tmpl');
$t->param(IMAGES => \@images);
print "Content-Type: text/html\n\n", $t->output;

Now, you need a template like this:

<form action="">
<select name="images">
<TMPL_LOOP IMAGES>
<option><TMPL_VAR image></option>
</TMPL_LOOP>
</form>

I think that these lines of code are enough to start your work; the Monastery is full of this examples. Please don't forget to begin your script with few magic words:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use vars qw($my $vars $are $here);

Ciao, Valerio

Disclaimer: please note that this code wasn't tested and is not approved by other monks.

[spartacus9]

Try using the opendir function and CGI.pm for the drop-down menu, as such:

use CGI qw(:standard :html3);
opendir THISDIR, "docs/images" or die "failed opening: $!";
 @allfiles = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir THISDIR;
closedir THISDIR;
print popup_menu(-name=>'images',
                 -values=>\@allfiles);