CGI Programming 101: Chapter 6: Reading and Writing Data Files

Full text for this chapter may be found here.

The text and programs here are from the first edition of CGI Programming 101. This has been replaced by the 2nd edition; please click here to view the updated material from the 2nd edition.

Name Description

survey.html Survey Example

survey.txt Modified survey.cgi from Chapter 5 (source code)

surveysumm.txt Survey Summarizer (source code)

surveysumm.cgi Survey Summarizer Example

Errata

1/20/2000: changed surveysumm.cgi to strip HTML tags out of the comments entered on the survey form. Inserted text is as follows:

     # since some wisecrackers think it's cute to add html tags to their
     # comments, we're ripping them out here.
     $comments =~ s/</&lt;/g;
     $comments =~ s/>/&gt;/g;

     # the following appends "$comments\n" to the end of the $commentary
     # string.
     # we only want to do this if the $comments are not blank...
     if ($comments ne "") {
         $commentary .= "$comments<p><hr>\n";
     }

You may prefer to remove the tags before writing to survey.out in the survey.cgi itself, however that means the data itself will be harder to read. By removing the tags in the summary cgi, that preserves the data as entered by the surveyees, while making it readable (and unhackable) on the summary page.

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	`Name`	`Description`
	`survey.html`	Survey Example
	`survey.txt`	Modified survey.cgi from Chapter 5 (source code)
	`surveysumm.txt`	Survey Summarizer (source code)
	`surveysumm.cgi`	Survey Summarizer Example