Debugging the CGI environment

I finished a CGI script yesterday that did some fiddly things with various environment variables, and carried various settings in hidden form fields. It became a hassle to print out the various values of things from time to time, so in the end I just used the following snippet to dump (or not) the values of the environment and the CGI post parameters.

Just flip from 0 to 1 when you need to display the contents to figure out what's what.

merlyn is quite right. I have successfully reinvented the Dump method. Having played with both now, all I can say in my defense is that the output from this snippet is more compact.

# assuming my $q = new CGI;
0 and print $q->ul( $q->li( [ map { "env $_ => $ENV{$_}" } sort keys %
+ENV ] ));
1 and print $q->ul( $q->li( [ map { "param $_ => @{[$q->param($_)]}" }
+ sort $q->param() ] ));
2 and print $q->Dump; # RTFM
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Re: Debugging the CGI environment
by merlyn (Sage) on Jan 23, 2002 at 20:07 UTC

      DUMPING OUT ALL THE NAME/VALUE PAIRS
  
       The Dump() method produces a string consisting of all the
       query's name/value pairs formatted nicely as a nested
       list.  This is useful for debugging purposes:
  
           print $query->Dump

       Produces something that looks like:

           <UL>
           <LI>name1
               <UL>
               <LI>value1
               <LI>value2
               </UL>
           <LI>name2
               <UL>
               <LI>value1
               </UL>
           </UL>

       As a shortcut, you can interpolate the entire CGI object
       into a string and it will be replaced with the a nice HTML
       dump shown above:

           $query=new CGI;
           print "<H2>Current Values</H2> $query\n";
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Also, beware! You should HTML-entitize your output, or not use text/html, when you do this.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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