Pass textbox input to perl script on server

Question

Sorry in advance for a potentially dumb newbie question, but here goes.

I am learning web app programming and I would like to have an input textbox on my webpage where the user enters some text. Then I capture that text and pass to a perl script which generates some output. I then take this text output and pass it back to the webpage.

Can someone point me in the right direction on how to do this.

Can be a really simple example, where the user inputs some text. I take the text and pass to a perl script which turns everything to uppercase - uc() - and then passes back to the webpage.

Thanks

mattexx · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-01 18:50:38Z

4

In your html body:

<FORM ACTION="/cgi-bin/results.pl">
<P>Enter a value: <INPUT NAME="value">
<P><INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Next">
</FORM>

In your results.pl:

use CGI qw(:standard); 
my $value = uc(param('value'));
print header;
print start_html;
print p($value);
print end_html;

edited Apr 1, 2011 at 18:50

answered Apr 1, 2011 at 18:02

mattexx

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3 Comments

racket99 Over a year ago

hmmm.. somehow i get 500 internal server error when running this. not sure what i am doing wrong. i checked that i have cgi.pm so that's not issue.

mattexx Over a year ago

@racket99 Usually this means your script isn't compiling. What do you get when you run it from the command line? ./results.pl

racket99 Over a year ago

actually i didn't make it executable. my bad. it works now.

Quentin · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-01 18:01:00Z

0

The page needs to contain a form. The action attribute of the form needs to point to a URL that your webserver will process with the Perl program. The simplist way to achieve this is using CGI, a more modern approach uses PSGI. Most Perl form processing libraries use a similar interface to CGI.pm's

answered Apr 1, 2011 at 18:01

Quentin

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Comments

Axeman · Accepted Answer · 2011-04-01 19:28:18Z

0

useCGI;

my $q = CGI->new;
my $text_box_value = $q->param( 'my_text_box_name' );

This is a decent CGI tutorial: http://www.tutorialspoint.com/perl/perl_cgi.htm . Or there's this http://www.cgi101.com/book/ or this http://www.lies.com/begperl/ or this http://websitehelpers.com/perl/ all found here: http://www.google.com/search?q=perl+CGI+tutorial

edited Apr 1, 2011 at 19:28

answered Apr 1, 2011 at 17:53

Axeman

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1 Comment

racket99 Over a year ago

Thanks, but how do I get the text from the webpage to this script?

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