Simple guestbook problem. (engtech)

Simple guestbook problem.

engtech

created: 2004-07-01 16:56:56

perlmonks

node
author

prlmnks

node
author

I am still a beginner and am writing a very simple guestbook that writes the data to a file. My problem is that if the user should press the enter button while in the textarea to get a new line instead of waiting for the wordwrap then that also gets recorded to the file as a new line. When I read the file for output, anything on the new line(s) is missed because it is not a valid line containing an id number. How could I prevent this?

    sub CheckForMsgs {	
    	my $strMsg = '';
    	my @MsgArray = ();
		my $MsgDate = 0;
		my $Message = '';
		my $GuestName = '';
		my $id = 0;
		my $colorflag = 0;
		my $bgcolor = "#FFFFCC";

# open the file for read
	open(DAT,"Guestbook.cgi") || die("Cannot Open  File:$!");
		@MsgArray = ;
	close(DAT);

 foreach $id (@MsgArray) {
	chomp ($id);
	($id,$MsgDate,$GuestName,$Message)=split (/\|/,$id);

# alternate table row background color to contrast entries.
 if ($id%2 eq 1){
				$bgcolor = "#FFFFCC";
    			$strMsg .= "\  $MsgDate  $GuestName  $Message  \n";

    	}

 else {
 				$bgcolor = "#DFDF00";
    			$strMsg .= "\  $MsgDate  $GuestName  $Message  \n";

        }

      }  

   	return $strMsg;

    };
####End of Sub
    
sub WriteNewMsg {
	my @MsgArray = ();
	my $id = 0;
	my $NewMsg = '';
	my $GuestName = '';
    my $now_string = strftime "%a %b%e %H:%M %Y", localtime;
    my $NewID = 1;
    
    &ReadParse(*input);
    
# open the file for read
	open(DAT,"Guestbook.cgi") || die("Cannot Open  File:$!");
		@MsgArray = ;
	close(DAT);
 
  open(DAT,">>Guestbook.cgi") || die("Cannot Open File:$!");
 foreach $id (@MsgArray) {
	chomp ($id);
	($id,$MsgDate,$GuestName,$NewMsg)=split (/\|/,$id);
	
	++$NewID;
 }
 # add Event to file
	print DAT "$NewID|$now_string|$input{'txtGuestName'}|$input{'txtMsg'}\n";
	close(DAT);
	};

###End of Sub

Re: Simple guestbook problem.

muba

created: 2004-07-01 17:05:28

perlmonks

prlmnks

Three options.
One: don't use text area's. Just use normal text boxes (no new lines allowed) instead.
But this is not too pretty, so:

Two: instead of thinging about $Message of a string of one line, read until you find a special line, for example: "#!#!END OF MESSAGE !#!#\n";
Everything, from the end of the message headers (author and such) of the message until that line should be considered the actual message.

Three: see the reply below. That one is even better!

Update: "added" an option :) © Happy-the-monk

"2b"||!"2b";$$_="the question"

Re: Simple guestbook problem.

Happy-the-monk

created: 2004-07-01 17:08:46

perlmonks

prlmnks

You should process the input from that textarea, replacing newlines with maybe <br> tags.

Cheers, Sören

Re: Simple guestbook problem.

beable

created: 2004-07-01 19:11:44

perlmonks

prlmnks

Something like this might work:

# replace newlines in message with brs
my $msg = $input{'txtMsg'};
$msg =~ s|\r||g;
$msg =~ s|\n|
|g;

# add Event to file
    print DAT "$NewID|$now_string|$input{'txtGuestName'}|$msg\n";

Re: Simple guestbook problem.

nightwatch

created: 2004-07-01 19:21:33

perlmonks

prlmnks

Use a sentinel value, such as '*' on a line by itself, to mark the end of each entry. Read perlvar for information on the $/ variable, which you can change from its default "\n" or "\r\n" to your sentinel value (say, "$/*$/"). If you do that, your use of the diamond operator in list context will still read all the results and place them into an array.

Be sure to sanitize your content in some way to prevent cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities and abuse of your sentinel value; a combination of simple regexes and the CPAN HTML::Sanitizer should do the trick.

Finally, it's somewhat misleading to name your file "Guestbook.cgi." The extension .cgi represents an executable CGI script, not a text file. Consider .txt or .dat.