Question

just downloaded ActivePerl. I want to embed the perl interpreter in a C# application (or at least call the perl interpreter from C#). I need to be able to send send out data to Perl from C#, then receive the output back into C#.

I just installed ActivePerl, and added MS Script Control 1.0 as a reference. I found this code on the internet, but am having trouble getting it to work.

 MSScriptControl.ScriptControlClass Interpreter = new MSScriptControl.ScriptControlClass();
Interpreter.Language = @"ActivePerl";
string Program = @"reverse 'abcde'";
string Results = (string)Interpreter.Eval(Program);
return Results;

Originally, it had ‘PerlScript’ instead of ‘ActivePerl’, but neither work for me. I’m not entirely sure what Interpreter.Language expects. Does it require the path to the interpreter?

Solved… I’m not sure how, but when I changed it back to PerlScript it works now. Still, I would like to know if MSScript Control is using ActivePerl or another interpreter.

Answer 1

I am not sure about the script control but I have done a similar thing where I had to ’embed’ spamassasin (which is a Perl program). I basically used the Process to do the job. Something along the lines of:

var proc = new Process
    {
        StartInfo =
        {
            FileName = "perl",
            WorkingDirectory = HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppPath,
            Arguments = " myscript.pl arg1 arg2",
            RedirectStandardOutput = true,
            RedirectStandardError = true,
            RedirectStandardInput = true,
            UseShellExecute = false
        }
    };
proc.Start();
proc.StandardInput.BaseStream.Write... // feed STDIN
proc.StandardOutput.Read... // Read program output
var procStdErr = proc.StandardError.ReadToEnd(); // errors
proc.StandardError.Close();
proc.StandardOutput.Close();
proc.WaitForExit(3000);
int exitCode = proc.ExitCode;
proc.Close();

This obviously not just Perl specific and it has the process creation overhead, so if you are running your script too often probably you need to think of a different solution.