perlfaq9
PERLFAQ9(1) Perl Programmers Reference Guide PERLFAQ9(1)
NAME
perlfaq9 - Networking ($Revision: 1.16 $, $Date: 2004/10/30 12:20:59 $)
DESCRIPTION
This section deals with questions related to networking, the internet,
and a few on the web.
What is the correct form of response from a CGI script?
(Alan Flavell <flavell+www@a5.ph.gla.ac.uk> answers...)
The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) specifies a software interface
between a program ("CGI script") and a web server (HTTPD). It is not
specific to Perl, and has its own FAQs and tutorials, and usenet group,
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi
The original CGI specification is at: http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/cgi/
Current best-practice RFC draft at: http://CGI-Spec.Golux.Com/
Other relevant documentation listed in:
http://www.perl.org/CGI_MetaFAQ.html
These Perl FAQs very selectively cover some CGI issues. However, Perl
programmers are strongly advised to use the CGI.pm module, to take care
of the details for them.
The similarity between CGI response headers (defined in the CGI speci-
fication) and HTTP response headers (defined in the HTTP specification,
RFC2616) is intentional, but can sometimes be confusing.
The CGI specification defines two kinds of script: the "Parsed Header"
script, and the "Non Parsed Header" (NPH) script. Check your server
documentation to see what it supports. "Parsed Header" scripts are sim-
pler in various respects. The CGI specification allows any of the usual
newline representations in the CGI response (it's the server's job to
create an accurate HTTP response based on it). So "\n" written in text
mode is technically correct, and recommended. NPH scripts are more
tricky: they must put out a complete and accurate set of HTTP transac-
tion response headers; the HTTP specification calls for records to be
terminated with carriage-return and line-feed, i.e ASCII \015\012 writ-
ten in binary mode.
Using CGI.pm gives excellent platform independence, including EBCDIC
systems. CGI.pm selects an appropriate newline representation
($CGI::CRLF) and sets binmode as appropriate.
My CGI script runs from the command line but not the browser. (500
Server Error)
Several things could be wrong. You can go through the "Troubleshooting
Perl CGI scripts" guide at
http://www.perl.org/troubleshooting_CGI.html
If, after that, you can demonstrate that you've read the FAQs and that
your problem isn't something simple that can be easily answered, you'll
probably receive a courteous and useful reply to your question if you
post it on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi (if it's something to do
with HTTP or the CGI protocols). Questions that appear to be Perl
questions but are really CGI ones that are posted to
comp.lang.perl.misc are not so well received.
The useful FAQs, related documents, and troubleshooting guides are
listed in the CGI Meta FAQ:
http://www.perl.org/CGI_MetaFAQ.html
How can I get better error messages from a CGI program?
Use the CGI::Carp module. It replaces "warn" and "die", plus the nor-
mal Carp modules "carp", "croak", and "confess" functions with more
verbose and safer versions. It still sends them to the normal server
error log.
use CGI::Carp;
warn "This is a complaint";
die "But this one is serious";
The following use of CGI::Carp also redirects errors to a file of your
choice, placed in a BEGIN block to catch compile-time warnings as well:
BEGIN {
use CGI::Carp qw(carpout);
open(LOG, ">>/var/local/cgi-logs/mycgi-log")
or die "Unable to append to mycgi-log: $!\n";
carpout(*LOG);
}
You can even arrange for fatal errors to go back to the client browser,
which is nice for your own debugging, but might confuse the end user.
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
die "Bad error here";
Even if the error happens before you get the HTTP header out, the mod-
ule will try to take care of this to avoid the dreaded server 500
errors. Normal warnings still go out to the server error log (or wher-
ever you've sent them with "carpout") with the application name and
date stamp prepended.
How do I remove HTML from a string?
The most correct way (albeit not the fastest) is to use HTML::Parser
from CPAN. Another mostly correct way is to use HTML::FormatText which
not only removes HTML but also attempts to do a little simple format-
ting of the resulting plain text.
Many folks attempt a simple-minded regular expression approach, like
"s/<.*?>//g", but that fails in many cases because the tags may con-
tinue over line breaks, they may contain quoted angle-brackets, or HTML
comment may be present. Plus, folks forget to convert entities--like
"<" for example.
Here's one "simple-minded" approach, that works for most files:
#!/usr/bin/perl -p0777
s/<(?:[^>'"]*|(['"]).*?\1)*>//gs
If you want a more complete solution, see the 3-stage striphtml program
in http://www.cpan.org/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/striphtml.gz .
Here are some tricky cases that you should think about when picking a
solution:
<IMG SRC = "foo.gif" ALT = "A > B">
<IMG SRC = "foo.gif"
ALT = "A > B">
<!-- <A comment> -->
<script>if (a<b && a>c)</script>
<# Just data #>
<![INCLUDE CDATA [ >>>>>>>>>>>> ]]>
If HTML comments include other tags, those solutions would also break
on text like this:
<!-- This section commented out.
<B>You can't see me!</B>
-->
How do I extract URLs?
You can easily extract all sorts of URLs from HTML with "HTML::Sim-
pleLinkExtor" which handles anchors, images, objects, frames, and many
other tags that can contain a URL. If you need anything more complex,
you can create your own subclass of "HTML::LinkExtor" or
"HTML::Parser". You might even use "HTML::SimpleLinkExtor" as an exam-
ple for something specifically suited to your needs.
You can use URI::Find to extract URLs from an arbitrary text document.
Less complete solutions involving regular expressions can save you a
lot of processing time if you know that the input is simple. One solu-
tion from Tom Christiansen runs 100 times faster than most module based
approaches but only extracts URLs from anchors where the first
attribute is HREF and there are no other attributes.
#!/usr/bin/perl -n00
# qxurl - tchrist@perl.com
print "$2\n" while m{
< \s*
A \s+ HREF \s* = \s* (["']) (.*?) \1
\s* >
}gsix;
How do I download a file from the user's machine? How do I open a file
on another machine?
In this case, download means to use the file upload feature of HTML
forms. You allow the web surfer to specify a file to send to your web
server. To you it looks like a download, and to the user it looks like
an upload. No matter what you call it, you do it with what's known as
multipart/form-data encoding. The CGI.pm module (which comes with Perl
as part of the Standard Library) supports this in the start_multi-
part_form() method, which isn't the same as the startform() method.
See the section in the CGI.pm documentation on file uploads for code
examples and details.
How do I make a pop-up menu in HTML?
Use the <SELECT> and <OPTION> tags. The CGI.pm module (available from
CPAN) supports this widget, as well as many others, including some that
it cleverly synthesizes on its own.
How do I fetch an HTML file?
One approach, if you have the lynx text-based HTML browser installed on
your system, is this:
$html_code = `lynx -source $url`;
$text_data = `lynx -dump $url`;
The libwww-perl (LWP) modules from CPAN provide a more powerful way to
do this. They don't require lynx, but like lynx, can still work
through proxies:
# simplest version
use LWP::Simple;
$content = get($URL);
# or print HTML from a URL
use LWP::Simple;
getprint "http://www.linpro.no/lwp/";
# or print ASCII from HTML from a URL
# also need HTML-Tree package from CPAN
use LWP::Simple;
use HTML::Parser;
use HTML::FormatText;
my ($html, $ascii);
$html = get("http://www.perl.com/");
defined $html
or die "Can't fetch HTML from http://www.perl.com/";
$ascii = HTML::FormatText->new->format(parse_html($html));
print $ascii;
How do I automate an HTML form submission?
If you're submitting values using the GET method, create a URL and
encode the form using the "query_form" method:
use LWP::Simple;
use URI::URL;
my $url = url('http://www.perl.com/cgi-bin/cpan_mod');
$url->query_form(module => 'DB_File', readme => 1);
$content = get($url);
If you're using the POST method, create your own user agent and encode
the content appropriately.
use HTTP::Request::Common qw(POST);
use LWP::UserAgent;
$ua = LWP::UserAgent->new();
my $req = POST 'http://www.perl.com/cgi-bin/cpan_mod',
[ module => 'DB_File', readme => 1 ];
$content = $ua->request($req)->as_string;
How do I decode or create those %-encodings on the web?
If you are writing a CGI script, you should be using the CGI.pm module
that comes with perl, or some other equivalent module. The CGI module
automatically decodes queries for you, and provides an escape() func-
tion to handle encoding.
The best source of detailed information on URI encoding is RFC 2396.
Basically, the following substitutions do it:
s/([^\w()'*~!.-])/sprintf '%%%02x', ord $1/eg; # encode
s/%([A-Fa-f\d]{2})/chr hex $1/eg; # decode
However, you should only apply them to individual URI components, not
the entire URI, otherwise you'll lose information and generally mess
things up. If that didn't explain it, don't worry. Just go read sec-
tion 2 of the RFC, it's probably the best explanation there is.
RFC 2396 also contains a lot of other useful information, including a
regexp for breaking any arbitrary URI into components (Appendix B).
How do I redirect to another page?
Specify the complete URL of the destination (even if it is on the same
server). This is one of the two different kinds of CGI "Location:"
responses which are defined in the CGI specification for a Parsed Head-
ers script. The other kind (an absolute URLpath) is resolved internally
to the server without any HTTP redirection. The CGI specifications do
not allow relative URLs in either case.
Use of CGI.pm is strongly recommended. This example shows redirection
with a complete URL. This redirection is handled by the web browser.
use CGI qw/:standard/;
my $url = 'http://www.cpan.org/';
print redirect($url);
This example shows a redirection with an absolute URLpath. This redi-
rection is handled by the local web server.
my $url = '/CPAN/index.html';
print redirect($url);
But if coded directly, it could be as follows (the final "\n" is shown
separately, for clarity), using either a complete URL or an absolute
URLpath.
print "Location: $url\n"; # CGI response header
print "\n"; # end of headers
How do I put a password on my web pages?
To enable authentication for your web server, you need to configure
your web server. The configuration is different for different sorts of
web servers---apache does it differently from iPlanet which does it
differently from IIS. Check your web server documentation for the
details for your particular server.
How do I edit my .htpasswd and .htgroup files with Perl?
The HTTPD::UserAdmin and HTTPD::GroupAdmin modules provide a consistent
OO interface to these files, regardless of how they're stored.
Databases may be text, dbm, Berkeley DB or any database with a DBI com-
patible driver. HTTPD::UserAdmin supports files used by the `Basic'
and `Digest' authentication schemes. Here's an example:
use HTTPD::UserAdmin ();
HTTPD::UserAdmin
->new(DB => "/foo/.htpasswd")
->add($username => $password);
How do I make sure users can't enter values into a form that cause my
CGI script to do bad things?
See the security references listed in the CGI Meta FAQ
http://www.perl.org/CGI_MetaFAQ.html
How do I parse a mail header?
For a quick-and-dirty solution, try this solution derived from "split"
in perlfunc:
$/ = '';
$header = <MSG>;
$header =~ s/\n\s+/ /g; # merge continuation lines
%head = ( UNIX_FROM_LINE, split /^([-\w]+):\s*/m, $header );
That solution doesn't do well if, for example, you're trying to main-
tain all the Received lines. A more complete approach is to use the
Mail::Header module from CPAN (part of the MailTools package).
How do I decode a CGI form?
You use a standard module, probably CGI.pm. Under no circumstances
should you attempt to do so by hand!
You'll see a lot of CGI programs that blindly read from STDIN the num-
ber of bytes equal to CONTENT_LENGTH for POSTs, or grab QUERY_STRING
for decoding GETs. These programs are very poorly written. They only
work sometimes. They typically forget to check the return value of the
read() system call, which is a cardinal sin. They don't handle HEAD
requests. They don't handle multipart forms used for file uploads.
They don't deal with GET/POST combinations where query fields are in
more than one place. They don't deal with keywords in the query
string.
In short, they're bad hacks. Resist them at all costs. Please do not
be tempted to reinvent the wheel. Instead, use the CGI.pm or
CGI_Lite.pm (available from CPAN), or if you're trapped in the module-
free land of perl1 .. perl4, you might look into cgi-lib.pl (available
from http://cgi-lib.stanford.edu/cgi-lib/ ).
Make sure you know whether to use a GET or a POST in your form. GETs
should only be used for something that doesn't update the server. Oth-
erwise you can get mangled databases and repeated feedback mail mes-
sages. The fancy word for this is ``idempotency''. This simply means
that there should be no difference between making a GET request for a
particular URL once or multiple times. This is because the HTTP proto-
col definition says that a GET request may be cached by the browser, or
server, or an intervening proxy. POST requests cannot be cached,
because each request is independent and matters. Typically, POST
requests change or depend on state on the server (query or update a
database, send mail, or purchase a computer).
How do I check a valid mail address?
You can't, at least, not in real time. Bummer, eh?
Without sending mail to the address and seeing whether there's a human
on the other end to answer you, you cannot determine whether a mail
address is valid. Even if you apply the mail header standard, you can
have problems, because there are deliverable addresses that aren't
RFC-822 (the mail header standard) compliant, and addresses that aren't
deliverable which are compliant.
You can use the Email::Valid or RFC::RFC822::Address which check the
format of the address, although they cannot actually tell you if it is
a deliverable address (i.e. that mail to the address will not bounce).
Modules like Mail::CheckUser and Mail::EXPN try to interact with the
domain name system or particular mail servers to learn even more, but
their methods do not work everywhere---especially for security con-
scious administrators.
Many are tempted to try to eliminate many frequently-invalid mail
addresses with a simple regex, such as "/^[\w.-]+\@(?:[\w-]+\.)+\w+$/".
It's a very bad idea. However, this also throws out many valid ones,
and says nothing about potential deliverability, so it is not sug-
gested. Instead, see http://www.cpan.org/authors/Tom_Chris-
tiansen/scripts/ckaddr.gz , which actually checks against the full RFC
spec (except for nested comments), looks for addresses you may not wish
to accept mail to (say, Bill Clinton or your postmaster), and then
makes sure that the hostname given can be looked up in the DNS MX
records. It's not fast, but it works for what it tries to do.
Our best advice for verifying a person's mail address is to have them
enter their address twice, just as you normally do to change a pass-
word. This usually weeds out typos. If both versions match, send mail
to that address with a personal message that looks somewhat like:
Dear someuser@host.com,
Please confirm the mail address you gave us Wed May 6 09:38:41
MDT 1998 by replying to this message. Include the string
"Rumpelstiltskin" in that reply, but spelled in reverse; that is,
start with "Nik...". Once this is done, your confirmed address will
be entered into our records.
If you get the message back and they've followed your directions, you
can be reasonably assured that it's real.
A related strategy that's less open to forgery is to give them a PIN
(personal ID number). Record the address and PIN (best that it be a
random one) for later processing. In the mail you send, ask them to
include the PIN in their reply. But if it bounces, or the message is
included via a ``vacation'' script, it'll be there anyway. So it's
best to ask them to mail back a slight alteration of the PIN, such as
with the characters reversed, one added or subtracted to each digit,
etc.
How do I decode a MIME/BASE64 string?
The MIME-Base64 package (available from CPAN) handles this as well as
the MIME/QP encoding. Decoding BASE64 becomes as simple as:
use MIME::Base64;
$decoded = decode_base64($encoded);
The MIME-Tools package (available from CPAN) supports extraction with
decoding of BASE64 encoded attachments and content directly from email
messages.
If the string to decode is short (less than 84 bytes long) a more
direct approach is to use the unpack() function's "u" format after
minor transliterations:
tr#A-Za-z0-9+/##cd; # remove non-base64 chars
tr#A-Za-z0-9+/# -_#; # convert to uuencoded format
$len = pack("c", 32 + 0.75*length); # compute length byte
print unpack("u", $len . $_); # uudecode and print
How do I return the user's mail address?
On systems that support getpwuid, the $< variable, and the Sys::Host-
name module (which is part of the standard perl distribution), you can
probably try using something like this:
use Sys::Hostname;
$address = sprintf('%s@%s', scalar getpwuid($<), hostname);
Company policies on mail address can mean that this generates addresses
that the company's mail system will not accept, so you should ask for
users' mail addresses when this matters. Furthermore, not all systems
on which Perl runs are so forthcoming with this information as is Unix.
The Mail::Util module from CPAN (part of the MailTools package) pro-
vides a mailaddress() function that tries to guess the mail address of
the user. It makes a more intelligent guess than the code above, using
information given when the module was installed, but it could still be
incorrect. Again, the best way is often just to ask the user.
How do I send mail?
Use the "sendmail" program directly:
open(SENDMAIL, "|/usr/lib/sendmail -oi -t -odq")
or die "Can't fork for sendmail: $!\n";
print SENDMAIL <<"EOF";
From: User Originating Mail <me\@host>
To: Final Destination <you\@otherhost>
Subject: A relevant subject line
Body of the message goes here after the blank line
in as many lines as you like.
EOF
close(SENDMAIL) or warn "sendmail didn't close nicely";
The -oi option prevents sendmail from interpreting a line consisting of
a single dot as "end of message". The -t option says to use the head-
ers to decide who to send the message to, and -odq says to put the mes-
sage into the queue. This last option means your message won't be
immediately delivered, so leave it out if you want immediate delivery.
Alternate, less convenient approaches include calling mail (sometimes
called mailx) directly or simply opening up port 25 have having an
intimate conversation between just you and the remote SMTP daemon,
probably sendmail.
Or you might be able use the CPAN module Mail::Mailer:
use Mail::Mailer;
$mailer = Mail::Mailer->new();
$mailer->open({ From => $from_address,
To => $to_address,
Subject => $subject,
})
or die "Can't open: $!\n";
print $mailer $body;
$mailer->close();
The Mail::Internet module uses Net::SMTP which is less Unix-centric
than Mail::Mailer, but less reliable. Avoid raw SMTP commands. There
are many reasons to use a mail transport agent like sendmail. These
include queuing, MX records, and security.
How do I use MIME to make an attachment to a mail message?
This answer is extracted directly from the MIME::Lite documentation.
Create a multipart message (i.e., one with attachments).
use MIME::Lite;
### Create a new multipart message:
$msg = MIME::Lite->new(
From =>'me@myhost.com',
To =>'you@yourhost.com',
Cc =>'some@other.com, some@more.com',
Subject =>'A message with 2 parts...',
Type =>'multipart/mixed'
);
### Add parts (each "attach" has same arguments as "new"):
$msg->attach(Type =>'TEXT',
Data =>"Here's the GIF file you wanted"
);
$msg->attach(Type =>'image/gif',
Path =>'aaa000123.gif',
Filename =>'logo.gif'
);
$text = $msg->as_string;
MIME::Lite also includes a method for sending these things.
$msg->send;
This defaults to using sendmail but can be customized to use SMTP via
Net::SMTP.
How do I read mail?
While you could use the Mail::Folder module from CPAN (part of the
MailFolder package) or the Mail::Internet module from CPAN (part of the
MailTools package), often a module is overkill. Here's a mail sorter.
#!/usr/bin/perl
my(@msgs, @sub);
my $msgno = -1;
$/ = ''; # paragraph reads
while (<>) {
if (/^From /m) {
/^Subject:\s*(?:Re:\s*)*(.*)/mi;
$sub[++$msgno] = lc($1) || '';
}
$msgs[$msgno] .= $_;
}
for my $i (sort { $sub[$a] cmp $sub[$b] || $a <=> $b } (0 .. $#msgs)) {
print $msgs[$i];
}
Or more succinctly,
#!/usr/bin/perl -n00
# bysub2 - awkish sort-by-subject
BEGIN { $msgno = -1 }
$sub[++$msgno] = (/^Subject:\s*(?:Re:\s*)*(.*)/mi)[0] if /^From/m;
$msg[$msgno] .= $_;
END { print @msg[ sort { $sub[$a] cmp $sub[$b] || $a <=> $b } (0 .. $#msg) ] }
How do I find out my hostname/domainname/IP address?
The normal way to find your own hostname is to call the `hostname` pro-
gram. While sometimes expedient, this has some problems, such as not
knowing whether you've got the canonical name or not. It's one of
those tradeoffs of convenience versus portability.
The Sys::Hostname module (part of the standard perl distribution) will
give you the hostname after which you can find out the IP address
(assuming you have working DNS) with a gethostbyname() call.
use Socket;
use Sys::Hostname;
my $host = hostname();
my $addr = inet_ntoa(scalar gethostbyname($host || 'localhost'));
Probably the simplest way to learn your DNS domain name is to grok it
out of /etc/resolv.conf, at least under Unix. Of course, this assumes
several things about your resolv.conf configuration, including that it
exists.
(We still need a good DNS domain name-learning method for non-Unix sys-
tems.)
How do I fetch a news article or the active newsgroups?
Use the Net::NNTP or News::NNTPClient modules, both available from
CPAN. This can make tasks like fetching the newsgroup list as simple
as
perl -MNews::NNTPClient
-e 'print News::NNTPClient->new->list("newsgroups")'
How do I fetch/put an FTP file?
LWP::Simple (available from CPAN) can fetch but not put. Net::FTP
(also available from CPAN) is more complex but can put as well as
fetch.
How can I do RPC in Perl?
A DCE::RPC module is being developed (but is not yet available) and
will be released as part of the DCE-Perl package (available from CPAN).
The rpcgen suite, available from CPAN/authors/id/JAKE/, is an RPC stub
generator and includes an RPC::ONC module.
AUTHOR AND COPYRIGHT
Copyright (c) 1997-2002 Tom Christiansen and Nathan Torkington. All
rights reserved.
This documentation is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
Irrespective of its distribution, all code examples in this file are
hereby placed into the public domain. You are permitted and encouraged
to use this code in your own programs for fun or for profit as you see
fit. A simple comment in the code giving credit would be courteous but
is not required.
perl v5.8.6 2004-11-05 PERLFAQ9(1)
