Your CGI script needs to save or mail the entire form contents to a file.
To store a form, use the CGI module's save_parameters
function or save
method, which take a filehandle argument. You can save to a file:
# first open and exclusively lock the file open(FH, ">>/tmp/formlog") or die "can't append to formlog: $!"; flock(FH, 2) or die "can't flock formlog: $!"; # either using the procedural interface use CGI qw(:standard); save_parameters(*FH); # with CGI::save # or using the object interface use CGI; $query = CGI->new(); $query->save(*FH); close(FH) or die "can't close formlog: $!";
Or, save to a pipe, such as one connected to a mailer process:
use CGI qw(:standard); open(MAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t") or die "can't fork sendmail: $!"; print MAIL <<EOF; From: $0 (your cgi script) To: hisname\@hishost.com Subject: mailed form submission EOF save_parameters(*MAIL); close(MAIL) or die "can't close sendmail: $!";
Sometimes all you want to do with form data is to save it for later use. The save_parameters
function and save
method in CGI.pm write form parameters to an open filehandle. That filehandle can be attached to an open file (preferably one opened in append mode and locked, as in the solution), or to a pipe whose other end is a mail program.
File entries are stored one per line as variable=value
pairs, with any funny characters URL-escaped. Each record is separated by a line with a single equals sign. These are typically read back by calling the CGI->new
method with a filehandle argument that manages all the unescaping automatically, as described below.
If you want to add extra information to your query before you save it, the param
function (or method, if you're using the object-oriented interface) can be called with more than one argument, setting the value(s) of a form parameter. For example, here's how you would save a time stamp and the entire environment:
param("_timestamp", scalar localtime); param("_environs", %ENV);
Once you've got the forms in a file, process them by using the object interface.
To load a query object from a filehandle, call the new
method with a filehandle argument. Each time you do this, it returns a complete form. When end of file is hit, the returned form has no parameters. The following code demonstrates this approach. It keeps a running total of all the "items
request"
parameters, but only if the form was not submitted from a perl.com site. Remember, we added the _environs
and _timestamp
parameters when we wrote the file.
use CGI; open(FORMS, "< /tmp/formlog") or die "can't read formlog: $!"; flock(FORMS, 1) or die "can't lock formlog: $!"; while ($query = CGI->new(*FORMS)) { last unless $query->param(); # means end of file %his_env = $query->param('_environs'); $count += $query->param('items requested') unless $his_env{REMOTE_HOST} =~ /(^|\.)perl\.com$/ } print "Total orders: $count\n";
File ownership and access permissions are an issue here, as they are in any files created by CGI script.
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