Re: using hash to lookup value

[naikonta]

Rolling your own CGI parameter parsing is not recommended but nothing stops from you doing that. Well, if you insist....

my %params; # declare a hash to hold the params later
if ($ENV{REQUEST_METHOD} eq 'GET' && $ENV{QUERY_STRING} ne '') {
 ....
 foreach .... {
   my($name, $value) = split .... # get the name and value
   ..... # cleaning name and value
   $params{$name} = $value; # hash assignment
 }
}

But, if you don't mind to use a CPAN module (I do recommend it), you can use CGI.pm or CGI::Simple. I assumed that the topic is requested with topic parameter (such as http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/help.cgi?topic=user) and that each topic has a corresponding html file.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use CGI::Simple;

my $baseurl = 'http://www.example.com/helps';
my %available_topics = (
  home => 'home.html',
  user => 'user.html',
  add => 'add.html',
  update => 'update.html',
  remove => 'remove.html',
  #... other help topics
);
my $default_topic = 'home';

my $cgi = CGI::Simple->new; # let CGI::Simple does the parsing
my $topic = $cgi->param('topic') || ''; # get the wanted topic
# get corresponding html file
my $help_file = $available_topcs{$topic} || $available_topics{$default
+_topic};

# send redirection
print $cgi->redirect("$baseurl/$help_file");