CGI Post query

[ant]

Hi,
Its been a while.
Here's a snippet of my code

print header();

if ($ENV{'REQUEST_METHOD'} eq 'POST') {
    
    read (STDIN, $input, $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'}) || print "could not e
+xecute query <br>";
    
    
    print "got into POST - $input $ENV{'CONTENT_LENGTH'} <br>" . <STDI
+N>;                                
        
        @pairs = split(/&/, $input);
    
}

The output is 'could not execute query '
howvever, when I replace print header with  print "Content-type: text/html","\r\n\r\n"; it all works fine. It seems with print header the STDIN cannot read the HTML form. Below this code, the HTML is formed with the form tag and method = 'post'.
Any ideas why this way worked would be great.
Cheers
Ant

[gellyfish]

It is not recommended to mix subroutines from CGI and hand-rolled parameter parsing: you will find that CGI has already read and exhausted STDIN after calling header(). You almost certainly want to use CGI's param() method to access the CGI parameters, rather than rolling your own.

/J\

[ant]

Thanks, for the advice, I took a look at the CGI documentation that you had linked and it covers putting forms into a hash with this piece of code

use CGI ':cgi-lib';
my $params = Vars;
print $params->{user};

I used the other method a few years ago and although I never encountered any problems with it, this way I think is much better with the same results.
It's good to learn something new everyday!

[merlyn]

You should unlearn this one though... it will come to bite you when you are using checkboxes or select-multiple option boxes. Understand that there can be multiple values for a given param, and simply ask for them as you need them. I really don't see what's so hard about:

my $last_name = param('last_name'); # only one last name
...
my @colleges_attended = param('colleges_attended'); # possibly 0 or ma
+ny colleges attended

That is, asking for it as you need it. Why does everyone wanna keep copying it into a hash? (It boggles me.)

[cowboy]

I would second the advice above about not rolling your own. Ovid has a nice explanation of ways rolling your own can bite you in his online cgi course here

[gellyfish]

You haven't imported the header subroutine. You should either do use CGI qw(header); ( or use CGI qw(:standard) if you intend to use other functions from the module.) Or you can specify the full package name of the subroutine - i.e. print CGI::header();

/J\

[ant]

Hi,
I was just trying to keep the code to a minimum however just to add a little more code, at the top of the program was

use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);

Cheers.

[wazoox]

print header; looks weird, header looks like a bareword to me. Better do  print header(); Then you'll probably find that you forgot to use CGI or something similar :)

[ant]

Quick Update
I tried the print header() and that still did not work. I very definetly had use CGI at the top of the script.
I inherited the code in a new job, and the previous programmer who was a DBA and not a Perl programmer and for each HTML field had
my $something = param( 'something' );
over and over again, I was just changing the program so that all the values were loaded into a hash.

[davorg]

Just having use CGI; isn't enough. If you're using the function interface to CGI.pm then you need to use one of the import tags - use CGI ':standard'; or use CGI ':cgi'; or something like that.

And if you're using CGI.pm, then you should really use the param method to access the parameters (as it seems the previous programmer did). Writing your own parameter parser as you seem to be trying to do is pointless and you're almost certain to miss out one of the corner cases that CGI.pm handles.