[boulder.pm] ok, I've got a perl question

[David Nicholas Kayal]

I have this template I use for making a web page.

http://yayproductions.com/nice_start_cgi.txt


On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Myke Komarnitsky wrote:

> This is more stylistic I think than syntactical.... but here goes.
>
> Most of my perl work is for web sites - databases, forms, cgi, etc... often
> of the time, inputted data is being put in a mysql database.  Thus, you have
> to parse and prepare the user's data.
>
> Silly and obvious question:  how do YOU go about getting the user data?
>
> every perl example I see has the OO style, eg.
> 	use CGI;
> 	$cgi = new CGI;
> 	my $name = $cgi->param("name");
> 	my $email = $cgi->param("email");
>
> which works, well, ok.  However, on one site, I have about 8 public forms
> and 30 admin forms.  Typing all that explicitly is a pain in the ass, and
> it's rife with opportunity to misspell a variable.
>
>
> My way of getting the data is by using
> 	use CGI qw/:cgi-lib -no_debug/;
> 	&ReadParse;
> which ends up giving me an %in hash with all the variables in there (eg.
> $in{'name'},$in{'email'}, etc..).  Nice benefits:
> 	I can loop through that hash for security/data sanitization
> 	Escaping the data for 's for database input
> 	If I add another field in the form, I don't have to add another
> 	line to the perl script.
> 	Error logging: on an error, I do
> 	foreach $key (sort keys %in) { print "$key ==> $in{$key}\n";}
> 	which is handy for troubleshooting what your input data is.
>
> I don't seem to ever run into other code that uses this method (an ancient
> and unnamed local perl fanatic taught me this method, I must confess), so
> I'm wondering if I'm missing something fantastically obvious.
>
> Myke
>
> Michael Komarnitsky      Komar Consulting Group
> 303.818.3718             http://www.komar.biz
> http://climbingboulder.com
> http://myke.komar.org
> -
>
>