Reading Data Into Your Perl Script

• The book mentions one way to do it in Chapter 5.
• But, there is an easier, more standard way to do it, using libraries.
• The KISS principle.
• CGI.pm and cgi-lib
• Both libraries work pretty much the same way-they read in the input data, parse it, put it into an object, and make it easy to access the data.
• Parsing the data is the hard part.  They take care of this for you.
• Both are widely available wherever Perl is found.  Thus, I highly recommend using them.
• Even if they are not available, they are freely distributable.  You can always just copy them into your local directory and use them there.
• You already use these.  The examples we copied over in the last class use CGI.pm and cgi-lib.  You can copy and paste these, then adapt them to your needs.