trouble with newlines

[ricktrip]

I've been having trouble with something that seems simple, but has kept me stumped for a couple of days. Heads up: I'm not a professional programmer. I'm very familiar with the book Learning Perl but largely foggy with Intermediate Perl.

My frustration is with getting newlines to work. The following code isolates my problem:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# trial.cgi

my $query = "student_id=triplett-1&submitButtonName=REGISTER";
my @name_value_pairs = split /&/, $query;

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print "$name_value_pairs[0]\n";
print "$name_value_pairs[1]\n";
print;

foreach my $pair (@name_value_pairs){
    print "$pair\n";
}

print $name_value_pairs[0];
print;
print;
print $name_value_pairs[1];
die "$query";
exit;

The first PRINT ends with two newlines as it should, and the server balks without them. This is as expected. But the remaining newlines appear on my browser as spaces for some reason, instead of on separate lines. Below is a copy/paste from my browser screen:

student_id=triplett-1 submitButtonName=REGISTER student_id=triplett-1 submitButtonName=REGISTER student_id=triplett-1submitButtonName=REGISTER

Also, I've tried replacing PRINT with SAY, but it won't compile. Maybe the version of the installed Perl?

Any comments/guesses will be most welcome!

Rick

[Kevin]

HTML is a markup language. If you use text/html as you content type then the browser will want HTML syntax. If you want plain newlines to work use text/plain as your content type.

[Kevin]

Also, I am not sure if you knew it or not but putting the die command at the end will cause that output to end up in the error log file instead of the browser.

[ricktrip]

Ah! (smacks his head). I knew I was overlooking something simple. Many thanks, Kevin! I'm going to have a drink in your honor!