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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. WWhhaatt iiss tthhee ccoorrrreecctt ffoorrmm ooff rreessppoonnssee ffrroomm aa CCGGII ssccrriipptt?? (Alan Flavell 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/CGIMetaFAQ.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.

MMyy CCGGII ssccrriipptt rruunnss ffrroomm tthhee ccoommmmaanndd lliinnee bbuutt nnoott tthhee bbrroowwsseerr.. ((550000 SSeerrvveerr EErrrroorr)) Several things could be wrong. You can go through the "Troubleshooting Perl CGI scripts" guide at http://www.perl.org/troubleshootingCGI.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/CGIMetaFAQ.html HHooww ccaann II ggeett bbeetttteerr eerrrroorr mmeessssaaggeess ffrroomm aa CCGGII pprrooggrraamm??

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. HHooww ddoo II rreemmoovvee HHTTMMLL ffrroomm aa ssttrriinngg?? 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/TomChristiansen/scripts/striphtml.gz . Here are some tricky cases that you should think about when picking a solution: A > B

<# Just data #>

>>>>>>>>>>> ]]> If HTML comments include other tags, those solutions would also break on text like this:

You can't see me!

HHooww ddoo II eexxttrraacctt UURRLLss??

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; HHooww ddoo II ddoowwnnllooaadd aa ffiillee ffrroomm tthhee uusseerr''ss mmaacchhiinnee?? HHooww ddoo II ooppeenn aa ffiillee oonn aannootthheerr mmaacchhiinnee?? 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

mmuullttiippaarrtt//ffoorrmm-ddaattaa encoding. The CGI.pm module (which comes with Perl

as part of the Standard Library) supports this in the startmulti-

partform() 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.

HHooww ddoo II mmaakkee aa ppoopp-uupp mmeennuu iinn HHTTMMLL??

Use the <> and <> 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. HHooww ddoo II ffeettcchh aann HHTTMMLL ffiillee??

One approach, if you have the lynx text-based HTML browser installed on

your system, is this:

$htmlcode = `lynx -source $url`;

$textdata = `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/";

$ascii = HTML::FormatText->new->format(parsehtml($html));

print $ascii;

HHooww ddoo II aauuttoommaattee aann HHTTMMLL ffoorrmm ssuubbmmiissssiioonn?? If you're submitting values using the GET method, create a URL and encode the form using the "queryform" method: use LWP::Simple; use URI::URL;

my $url = url('http://www.perl.com/cgi-bin/cpanmod');

$url->queryform(module => 'DBFile', 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/cpanmod',

[ module => 'DBFile', readme => 1 ];

$content = $ua->request($req)->asstring;

HHooww ddoo II ddeeccooddee oorr ccrreeaattee tthhoossee %%-eennccooddiinnggss oonn tthhee wweebb??

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). HHooww ddoo II rreeddiirreecctt ttoo aannootthheerr ppaaggee?? 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

HHooww ddoo II ppuutt aa ppaasssswwoorrdd oonn mmyy wweebb ppaaggeess?? 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. HHooww ddoo II eeddiitt mmyy ..hhttppaasssswwdd aanndd ..hhttggrroouupp ffiilleess wwiitthh PPeerrll?? The HTTPD::UserAdmin and HTTPD::GroupAdmin modules provide a consistent

OO interface to these files, regardless of how they're stored. Data-

bases may be text, dbm, Berkeley DB or any database with a DBI compati-

ble 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);

HHooww ddoo II mmaakkee ssuurree uusseerrss ccaann''tt eenntteerr vvaalluueess iinnttoo aa ffoorrmm tthhaatt ccaauussee mmyy CCGGII ssccrriipptt ttoo ddoo bbaadd tthhiinnggss?? See the security references listed in the CGI Meta FAQ http://www.perl.org/CGIMetaFAQ.html HHooww ddoo II ppaarrssee aa mmaaiill hheeaaddeerr??

For a quick-and-dirty solution, try this solution derived from "split"

in perlfunc:

$/ = '';

$header = ;

$header =~ s/\n\s+/ /g; # merge continuation lines

%head = ( UNIXFROMLINE, 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). HHooww ddoo II ddeeccooddee aa CCGGII ffoorrmm?? 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 CONTENTLENGTH for POSTs, or grab QUERYSTRING 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

CGILite.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). HHooww ddoo II cchheecckk aa vvaalliidd mmaaiill aaddddrreessss?? 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/TomChris-

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. HHooww ddoo II ddeeccooddee aa MMIIMMEE//BBAASSEE6644 ssttrriinngg??

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;

$decoded = decodebase64($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

HHooww ddoo II rreettuurrnn tthhee uusseerr''ss mmaaiill aaddddrreessss??

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. HHooww ddoo II sseenndd mmaaiill?? 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 To: Final Destination 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 -ooii option prevents sendmail from interpreting a line consisting of

a single dot as "end of message". The -tt option says to use the head-

ers to decide who to send the message to, and -ooddqq 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 => $fromaddress,

To => $toaddress,

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. HHooww ddoo II uussee MMIIMMEE ttoo mmaakkee aann aattttaacchhmmeenntt ttoo aa mmaaiill mmeessssaaggee?? 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->asstring;

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. HHooww ddoo II rreeaadd mmaaiill?? 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) ] }

HHooww ddoo II ffiinndd oouutt mmyy hhoossttnnaammee//ddoommaaiinnnnaammee//IIPP aaddddrreessss??

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 $addr = inetntoa(scalar gethostbyname($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.) HHooww ddoo II ffeettcchh aa nneewwss aarrttiiccllee oorr tthhee aaccttiivvee nneewwssggrroouuppss?? 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")'

HHooww ddoo II ffeettcchh//ppuutt aann FFTTPP ffiillee?? 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. HHooww ccaann II ddoo RRPPCC iinn PPeerrll?? 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

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)