HTTP - Perl Programming

Posted by ChrisS (ChrisS), 11 December 2003

My application currently recieves data via TCP/IP sockets.

However I now need to investigate accepting HTTP messages.

Is there a module on the CPAN that anyone knows of that could help me?

Posted by ChrisS (ChrisS), 11 December 2003

I have found:
LWP - But is this only for client side.. or can I use the tools provided in reverse?

also just literally:
SOAP::Transport::HTTP::Server
I have no idea what this is yet...

Any ideas?

Posted by admin (Graham Ellis), 11 December 2003

Hi, Chris .. at the risk of being branded a politician who answers only the questions he wants to rather than the question that was asked ... here's a web server written in Perl that uses only the Socket module that's a part of the standard distribution and one of our own modules to filter. Might provide you with some food for thought. Not sure about modules - I've not bothered for this sort of thing!

Code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

# httpd requests - echo server

use Socket;
use whc_filter;

# Set up listener

$on_port = 8080;
$proto = getprotobyname("tcp");

socket (Server, PF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, $proto) ||
die ("socket");
setsockopt(Server, SOL_SOCKET,SO_REUSEADDR,1) ||
die ("setsockopt");
$pbind = sockaddr_in($on_port,INADDR_ANY) ||
die ("sockaddr_in");
bind(Server,$pbind) ||
die ("bind");
listen(Server,SOMAXCONN) ||
die ("listen");

# await a contact

@response = <DATA>;

while ($paddr = accept(Client, Server)) {
while (<Client>) {
push @gotten,$_;
if ($_ =~ /^\s*$/) { last;}
($f,$v) = split(/\s+/,$_,2);
$param{lc($f)} = $v;
}

if ($gotten[0] =~ /^POST/) {
read(Client,$data,$param{"content-length:"});
}

whc_filter::scrub(@gotten);
print Client @response;
print Client @gotten,"</PRE>";
if ($gotten[0] =~ /^POST/) {
($dsay .= $&."<BR>") while ($data =~ s/^(.{1,80})//);
print Client "<H4>Posted Data:</H4><CODE>\n";
print Client $dsay,"</CODE>";
}
print Client "</BODY></HTML>\n";
close Client;
$#gotten = -1;
undef %param;
}

__END__
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 1999 13:59:18 GMT
Server: Well House Consultants / PAN 1.0
Content-type: text/html

<HTML>
<BODY bgcolor=white text=black>
You have contacted the Server Echo Service that tells you what
your browser sent in its request!<P>
<H2>The Data provided to the server was:</H2>
<BR><PRE>

and the module

Code:

package whc_filter;

# HTML filters.

require 5.003;
use strict;

# scrub encodes & < and > in an array into ISO characters
# Also replaces hard new line characters with <P> and <BR>

sub scrub (\@) {
my ($svar,$k);
$svar = \@_;
for ($k=0;$k<=$#{$svar};$k++) {
$_=$svar->[$k];
s/&/&/g;
s/</</g;
s/>/>/g;
s/\n\r/\n/g; # dos to standard
s/\r/\n/g; # mac to standard
s/\n{2,}/<P>/g;
s/\n/<BR>/g;
$svar->[$k] = $_;
}
}

1;

Posted by ChrisS (ChrisS), 11 December 2003

Thanks Graham..

I'll look into that..

I think Mr O'reilly's book may come in handy on some of thoughs calls!!

Perhaps I can give you a shout if I get stuck

Chris

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