Apache Administrator's Handbook

Appendix D. mod_perl Example Code

The following are a few code examples that were omitted from Chapter 17, “mod_perl,” in the interests of brevity.

mod_perl Form Handler Code

In Chapter 17, code was presented that would parse the contents of a HTML form, or the contents of URL “command-line” arguments in ?key=value&key=value syntax.

The portion of this code that does the actual form parsing is the single line that follows:

my %form = $r->method eq 'POST' ? $r->content : $r->args;

This line uses the Perl ? : syntax, which functions exactly like an if/else clause. This syntax allows for a simple if/else clause to be expressed in one line, as shown in the example. If written out fully, the statement would look like the following block:

 my %form; # Declare ...