pass perl input to php input field

[oaktown]

Running two input forms on the same page, one php and the other (the one I would like to create) to be written in perl. The idea is to accept an input from a perl script, then pass that input to two other input fields, one in perl and the other in php. The two existing input fields (perl and php) are stand alone scripts. The perl script searches a flat text data base, while the php script searches a MySQL data base. The end result desired is to accept the one input (the script I want created) and pass it to the other two existing scripts via their input fields, and process the search so the search results can be displayed. Obviously, I want to search both data bases at the same time for the one input.

Hope this makes sense.

[KevinADC]

not sure I understand your scenario, but you have to decide where to send the initial data for processing, to the php script or the perl script.

php and perl can communicate with each other on the server through various mechanism. But this sounds over complicated, you should stick with one or the other to do the entire thing, both php and perl can process text or query a database. Mixing the two is not very common.

[oaktown]

Well, the idea was to pass one input to two different stand-alone scripts, each performing a search but with different databases. Since each existing script is fully functional for what they are intended to do, I did not want to modify either of them. Hence a separate new script to pass data input to both scripts. Thereby only requiring the user to input one search criteria and have the two existing scripts perform the search task without the user needing to input the search twice. In other words, the user wold not know that the existing two scripts are doing the search. the user would only see one input field.

I sort of figured it would be complex.

[KevinADC]

You can't send the form data to two scripts. You send it to one script. That script communicates with the other script through whatever function or method it uses to pass data to a seperate application and get data back. Then the one script returns all the data from both scripts back to the user.

[oaktown]

I was afraid that would be the case. I suppose another route would be to import the flat file database into a MySQL database containing the other data that I want to compare it with. Then so as to have each data sets current, run a cron job to merge the data sets. And this scenario is way beyond my expertise.

Thanks KevinADC for your input.

[KevinADC]

php and perl can both query a database and parse text files. There is no need to be using both. I guess you don't know how to convert php to perl or perl to php. Don't feel bad, I don't either.