http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=263134

footpad has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

The apprentice tries to dust off and improve some unused skills...

I'm creating a 404 ErrorDocument handler to perform redirects based on file name changes on my site's source files. Here's an abbreviated version of what's currently working:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);
$| = 1;

my $cgi = new CGI;
my $dir = '/my/httpd/path'; # spoofed
my $old = $ENV{ 'REDIRECT_URL' } || '';
my $new = '';

if ( $old =~ /(.*?)\.foo/i )
  { 
    $new = "$1.bar";
    if ( -e "$dir$new" ) 
    { 
      print redirect( $new );
      exit;
    }
  }
else { doStandard404(); }

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My petition is, "Is there a way to set the status code of the redirection?" (The idea, as you might expect, is to return a 301 indicating that the document has moved permanently, so the search engines will notice the change and update their databases accordingly) Alternatively, does CGI.pm already return an appropriate error code?

I've checked the Friendly Docs, but didn't see anything. Also, a few google searches didn't turn up anything that seemed relevant, though may be due to my lack of tilly-fu.)

Details, if they're relevant, include Apache 2.0, Perl 5.6.1, CGI.pm 2.93

Thanks in advance...

--f

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: CGI Redirect with Status
by Ovid (Cardinal) on Jun 04, 2003 at 20:40 UTC

    I've never been quite sure why this is, but CGI.pm hard-codes the redirection value:

    sub redirect {
    my($self,@p) = self_or_default(@_);
    my($url,$target,$cookie,$nph,@other) = rearrange([[LOCATION,URI,UR
+L],TARGET,['COOKIE','COOKIES'],NPH],@p);
    $url ||= $self->self_url;
    my(@o);
    foreach (@other) { tr/\"//d; push(@o,split("=",$_,2)); }
    unshift(@o,
         '-Status'  => '302 Moved',
         '-Location'=> $url,
         '-nph'     => $nph);
    unshift(@o,'-Target'=>$target) if $target;
    unshift(@o,'-Type'=>'');
    my @unescaped;
    unshift(@unescaped,'-Cookie'=>$cookie) if $cookie;
    return $self->header((map {$self->unescapeHTML($_)} @o),@unescaped
+);
}

    [download]

    There are various ways to deal with this, none of them completely satisfactory. Perhaps the easiest would be to generate your own redirect header rather than rely on CGI.pm.

    Cheers,
    Ovid

    New address of my CGI Course.
    Silence is Evil (feel free to copy and distribute widely - note copyright text)

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Re: CGI Redirect with Status
by sutch (Curate) on Jun 04, 2003 at 20:41 UTC
    Try it!

    This: 

    #!/usr/bin/perl -Tw

use CGI qw(:standard);
my $cgi = new CGI;
print redirect('http://perlmonks.org/');

    [download]
    Results in: 
    bash-2.05$ ./test.pl
Status: 302 Moved
Location: http://perlmonks.org/

bash-2.05$

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[select]

      Your results show his problem. He wants a 301 status code (moved permanently), not a 302 status code (Found). See status code definitions for more information.

      Cheers,
      Ovid

      New address of my CGI Course.
      Silence is Evil (feel free to copy and distribute widely - note copyright text)

[reply]

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