Re: Clever autoflush detail

[BrowserUk]

I don't do cgi, but surely the problem (being fixed by using PRE tags), is not at the output end, but at the browser end?

Normally, html ignores CR/LF. So, the browser cannot display the line until it gets something (like: BR or P) that tells it that this 'line' is complete and can be formatted. Using the PRE tags means that CR/LF is respected, so the browser can display the line as soon as it sees those characters.

[talexb]

Normally, html ignores CR/LF. So, the browser cannot display the line until it gets something (like: BR or P) that tells it that this 'line' is complete and can be formatted.

Right, but I made a point of setting the content type to be text/plain (that is, specifically not to be HTML), and that worked correctly using the shell script, but not using the Perl script. That's why I'm confused.

[Joost]

Are you sure?

from your code: print $cgi->header('text/html');

[talexb]

The first Perl script in my original post had 'text/plain'; that's the one that I'm talking about.

And as blahblah correctly points out lower down, this appears to have something to do with CGI, because if I remove that dependency as follows:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$|=1;

{
    print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

    print "Autoflush is currently " . ($|?"on":"off") . ".\n";
    for ( 1..5 ) {

      print "Value is $_.\n";

      sleep 1;
    }
    print "Autoflush is currently " . ($|?"on":"off") . ".\n";
}

The script works properly. So CGI is ignoring $| and doing its own caching. Now I know.