Question

I am trying to do a simple upload of a .csv file and save it on my server. I’m not an expert in HTML or Perl, but due to client constraints this is what I must do.

Here is the HTML:

<form action="/path/to/service" target="_self" method="POST" enctype="multipart/form-data">
File: <input type="file" name="attachment" size="50">
<SUBMIT_RESET Upload File>
</form>

The Perl code looks like this:

    my $sql = "SELECT NOW()";
    my $date = $DB->get_field($sql);

    my ($path, $ext) = split(/\./, $in{'attachment'});
    my @pathParts = split(/\//, $path);            
    my $filename = $pathParts[@pathParts - 1] . " - " . $date;

    if ($ext eq "csv") {                

        open (OUTFILE, ">", "$datadir/imports/" . $filename . "." . $ext);

        while (read($in{'attachment'}, $buffer, 1024)) {
            $file .= $buffer;
        }
        print OUTPUT $file;
        close (OUTFILE);
    }

Can anyone please give me some direction as to what I’m doing wrong. I get the file located at the correct path, but it’s always empty.

Now, the code base I’m dealing with here is horrible and I cannot use strict.

Suggestions?

EDIT1:
To attempt to answer how $in{‘attachment’} is populated I’ve included a snippet of code of how forms are handled.

if ($ENV{‘CONTENT_TYPE’} =~ m#^multipart/form-data#) {
my $cgi = new CGI;
my @names = $cgi->param;

        foreach $name (@names) {
            my @value = $cgi->param($name);
            if (scalar(@value) > 1) {
                foreach $val (@value) {
                    $in{$name} .= $val."\0";
                }
                $in{$name} =~s/\\0$//;
            } else {
                my $value = $cgi->param($name);
                #my $value = join "\0", @value;
                $in{$name} = $value;
            }
            #my $value = $cgi->param($name);
            #my $value = join "\0", @value;
            #$in{$name} = $value;
        }

EDIT2:

To summarize the solution provided by ikegami…

I missed that the file handles were different for the read and print statements – OUTFILE and OUTPUT. Clearly that is completely a novice mistake and for that I apologize!

Best wishes to all who tried to help me.

Answer 1

You shouldn’t be using global variables. If your file handles had been lexical variables (supported since 2000!) and if you had been using use strict; (also supported since 2000, if not earlier!), you would have found the problem:

You’re not using the right variable in your print call.

open (OUTFILE, ">", "$datadir/imports/" . $filename . "." . $ext);
print OUTPUT $file;

---

When I discovered the problem, I was about to recommend you find out what error you actually got:

open(my $OUTFILE, ">", "$datadir/imports/$filename.$ext")
   or die $!;

while (1) {
   my $rv = read($in{'attachment'}, my $buf, 1024);
   die $! if !defined($rv);
   last if !$rv;

   print $OUTFILE $buf
      or die $!;
}

close($OUTFILE)
   or die $!;

(I was going to hypothesise that the error was “Bad file descriptor” due to passing something that isn’t a file handle to read.)