Recipe 19.12 Saving a Form to a File or Mail Pipe

19.12.1 Problem

Your CGI script needs to save or mail the entire form contents to a file.

19.12.2 Solution

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: $!";

19.12.3 Discussion

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 invoking the CGI->new method with a filehandle argument that manages all of the unescaping automatically, as described later.

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 take more than one argument, setting the value(s) of a form parameter. For example, here's how to save a time stamp and the entire environment:

param("_timestamp", scalar localtime);
param("_environs", %ENV);

Once you have 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 "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 for any files created by CGI scripts.

19.12.4 See Also

Recipe 18.3; Recipe 19.3