Creating Forms

To decipher a specific special character, simply refer to our table below. These are commonly used punctuations.

Punctuations that don’t have a coded equivalent include the following:

• @ the “at” symbol
• * the asterisk
• - the dash mark
• _ the underscore
• . the period

Occasionally, you might get a raw “ASCII based e-mail message containing a file called “postdata.att” of an unspecified type (application/octet-stream). The e-mail subject line will typically state “Form posted from Microsoft Internet Explorer” so you know the file came from someone using the Internet Explorer browser, if that means anything to you. Since this file type is not associated with any common application (and that it’s resident e-mail specifically states that the encoding is “7bit”), you’ll have to open it using either Microsoft Notepad or Microsoft WordPad (which can both be initialized by going to “Start”, “Programs” and “Accessories”). Simply use the program’s “Open” command from the “File” menu and select the option “All Files (*.*)” in the “Files of type” field for Notepad or the option “All Documents (*.*)” for WordPad and browse until you find the file in the directory you saved the “postdata.att” file in. From this point, its just a matter of copy and pasting the file’s contents (if worthy enough) to your manual guestbook or other file if you chose to save it.

Side Note: If you have access to a cgi-bin (the folder that typically stores files of type “.pl” and “.cgi”) please feel free and give a shot setting up some scripts. The scripts at Matt’s Script Archive (http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts) are fairly easy to set-up for beginners. Simply follow the instructions to configure them and set permissions and you have an opportunity for creating a potentially advanced (and interactive) site. And, if you make use of the “formmail.pl” script, you can forget about taking all the time deciphering your e-mail form input. With this method, you can also be guaranteed to have the form data sent to you rather than have it sent via the e-mail method where its possible that your user might not have their e-mail program set-up. (And if they don’t have their e-mail program set-up, they can’t send the form input to you since the default method is based on e-mail delivery.) The “formmail.pl” script also gives you the option to set-up a thank you page that appears when the user clicks the “Submit” button. (Hey, it’s a lot better than clicking the Submit button and having the appearance of nothing processing.) Generally speaking, with the user of CGI scripts, you won’t have to worry about what’s supported with what browser and so on. If you had used JavaScript interactivity, for instance, you would have had to do research to see if your specific effect would work for the majority of Internet surfers. Contact your system administrator to see if you have access to a cgi-bin. Many Web hosting providers allow their customers to install their own scripts. You might also want to check out The CGI Resource Index at http://cgi.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/ for more CGI/PERL scripts to work with. This site has an extensive library of many popular scripts on the World Wide Web. An in-depth discussion of implementing CGI and PERL scripts to your Web directory may be found in the “Installing CGI/PERL Scripts” section.