The Other Side -- receiving and processing information in CGI ( Perl) script

There are basic ways to process or parse input in a Perl

• Do it yourself -- write several lines of Perl code to process the input.
• Use pre-written Perl libraries -- somebody has already done the arduous task of writing Perl code to parse input.

Which option would you choose?

Bear in mind that:

• Input can be provide by different mechanism.
• Input of many arguments, name/value pairs may get complex.
• We do not know enough Perl to do it ourselves yet!!
• Prewritten code has been extensively tested -- It should work.

THE INFORMED VIEW IS TO USE: pre-written Perl libraries

There are many Perl libraries available to read and parse CGI input. These are freely available on the World Wide Web

The library that has become the de facto standard is the cgi-lib.pl library.

Further Information on this library is available from http://www.bio.cam.ac.uk/cgi-lib/.

Copies of the actual Perl file are available from above web site and locally.

You should find copies of the {\tt cgi-pl} file in:

• The {\em MacPerl Application} folder on the maclab hard disk.
• The {\em My Personal Web Site} folder on the maclab hard disk.
• You can download the file from http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/User/Dave.Marshall/cgi-lib.pl .