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Wrapping up our Google API project, we finally convert the Perl script into a CGI and decorate the SVG output with a bit of HTML.
Perl has traditionally been popular for powering dynamic Web sites, not least due to the mighty but easy to use CGI module. A common technique is to use the same script for all requests of our little application, distinguishing between them through parameters:
| Request | Parameter p | Parameter q |
|---|---|---|
| Start HTML page | (none or empty) | (none or empty) |
| Response HTML page | (none or empty) | [search term] |
| Response embedded SVG | svg | [search term] |
In code this looks like:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI;
...
my $cgi = new CGI;
my $query = $cgi->param('q');
my $part = $cgi->param('p');
if (!defined($query) || $query eq "") {
# print start HTML page
}
else {
if (!defined($part) || $part eq "") {
# print result HTML page
}
else {
# access Google and print SVG results
}
}
The start page consists of a header with a simple form for entering the search term:
print <<EOF; content-type: text/html <html><head><title>Google SVG Search</title></head> <body><h1>Google SVG Search</h1> <form><input type=text name=q><input type=submit value='Google Search'></form> </body></html> EOF
And here come the results...
Produced by Michael Claßen
URL: http://www.webreference.com/xml/column57/index.html
Created: Jun 10, 2002
Revised: Jun 10, 2002