[rt-users] Doubt in Login.html

[Trevin Beattie]

"FORM" is an HTML tag which encloses an input form.  In this case, the
login box (username and password).

"METHOD=POST" means that the form data will be passed in the HTTP
headers (as opposed to GET, where data is passed encoded in the URL).

"ACTION=" defines the URL to which the form data will be sent.

"UNIVERSAL::can" is a Perl function which determines whether the class
object ($r) has a method of the given name ('uri').

"$r" is a global request object passed from Apache which can be used to
obtain various information about the HTTP session.  See
http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/api/Apache.html for documentation.

"$r->uri" is a method that returns the requested URI minus any query
string; in other words, it's a reference back to the login page itself.

"=~ m!.*/(.*)!" is a Perl pattern-matching operator, which in essence
looks for the last '/' character in the string and then returns all
characters that follow it.  In this context with $r->uri, it takes the
URL of the login page and strips off the host and directory components,
leaving just the base name of the page.

-- Trevin Beattie

On Mon, 2005-08-08 at 11:07 -0500, Ahalya_Nathan at mudnebr.com wrote:
> 
> Hi all, 
> Can someone interpret this piece of code in Login.html 
> 
> <FORM METHOD=POST ACTION="<% (UNIVERSAL::can($r, 'uri') && ($r->uri)
> =~ m!.*/(.*)!) %>" > 
> 
> Regards,
> Ahalya Nathan
> Senior Programmer / Analyst
> Information Technology, Metropolitan Utilities District