Forms and Form Data

Text Areas

• A text area allows the user to enter many lines of text.
• Use the text "field" construct, as opposed to this text "area" construct to allow the user to shorter single line text fields.
• The Perl CGI construct to create a text area would be as follows:
  

  # Generate a text area for data entry
  print $query->h1('Please enter some more text');
  print $query->textarea({-name=>'TextareaOne',
  			 -default=>'Enter lots of your text here',
  			 -rows=>4,
  			 -columns=>60});
  

• The Perl CGI construct to then later extract the contents of this area would be
  

  # Extract out whatever the contents of our text area was.
  my $textInput = $query->param(-name=>'TextareaOne');
  print $query->p('The text area contents were:'), $query->br();
  print $query->em({-align=>'center'}, $textInput);