Re: (Ovid) Re: Web Initiated File Download

Ovid, thanks. Working from your code snippet I rolled it into the code below. Changed it to use CGI header generation and also passing a default file name. Probably not good for everyone, but works well for what I'm doing. This worked in both IE5.5 & NS4.7x when I pass it a MIME of $mime_type = "text/tab-separated-values\; charset=us-ascii";
One question, what does the localization of $/ do? I understand what they do independently, but why is this necessary?

sub download_file {
#    REF: http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=110714&lastnode_id
+=3628
    my ( $send_file, $send_name, $mime ) = @_;
    die "$send_file does not exist." unless ( -e $send_file );
    my $filesize = -s $send_file;
    print $query->header(-type=>$mime,
                                -Content_disposition=>"attachment; fil
+ename=$send_name",
                                -Content_Length=>"$filesize"
            );
    # open in binmode
    open READ, "< $send_file" or die "Cannot open $send_file for readi
+ng: $!";
    binmode READ;
    binmode STDOUT; # stream it out
    {
        local $/;
        print <READ>;
    }
    close(READ);
    return(1); # should always return true
}
[download]

-THRAK
www.polarlava.com

Comment on Re: (Ovid) Re: Web Initiated File Download Select or Download Code

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(Ovid) Re(3): Web Initiated File Download
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Sep 07, 2001 at 19:48 UTC

THRAK asked:

What does the localization of $/ do?

As you probably know, $/ is the input record separator. Typically, this is set to the newline on the system the program runs on. This causes records to be read in "one line" at a time. However, since you intend to send all of this data straight to the browser, I thought it would be more efficient to use "slurp mode". By using local $/, the input record separator is undef and this causes the print to send the entire file without needing a while loop. However, I put $/ in its own scope to ensure that it would not clobber whatever value it had originally been set to, since this is a global variable.

Cheers,
Ovid

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