trying to run a perl program in HTML

[aykes]

I have a perl program (running on windows). I want to run it through a webpage (local on my computer). Is the a way for HTML to run 'perl myprogram.pl?

Originally posted as a Categorized Question.

[tinman]

You need to install a webserver on your computer.. use IIS, PWS, or even Apache for Win32..

Next, write a HTML form as so..

<form action="launcher.pl" method="post">
<input type="submit" name="sub" value="Run this!">
</form>

on your page..

Inside your launcher.pl CGI script (yes, you've writen a CGI script now), execute the Perl script that you want using exec or system or backticks like so..

#!c:/perl/bin -w
use strict;
use CGI;

my $q = new CGI;

my $path_to_program = "c:/perl/myprog/prog.pl";
my $return_value = system("c:/perl/bin/perl.exe",$path_to_program);

# this is the actual execution of the script. 
# now you can put a message to the user
print $q->header; # send correct header, text/html
# put HTML here

It might be best if you restrict access to this script to ONLY your machine..
HTH

[epoptai]

You need to set up a webserver with Common Gateway Interface (CGI) to execute perl scripts on your local computer. Meanwhile you can capture the HTML output of a script with something like perl myprogram.pl >myprogram.html to view static pages in a browser.

[tomhukins]

If you use ActivePerl, you can write client side Perl scripts, just as you might write client side Javascript. Be aware of the security implications of doing this: you don't want malicious Web pages to include things like unlink within <SCRIPT> tags, for example.