Writing a guestbook for your (Python-based) web server with CGI

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a standard in web programming by which custom scripts can be used to produce web server output. You would like to catch the HTML form input from a user's browser, redirect it to another page, and acknowledge a user action.

Getting ready

To run this recipe, you first need to run a web server that supports CGI scripts.

How to do it...

We placed our Python CGI script inside a cgi-bin/ subdirectory and then visited the HTML page that contains the feedback form. Upon submitting this form, our web server will send the form data to the CGI script, and we'll see the output produced by this script.

Listing 5.7 shows us how the Python web server supports CGI:

#!/usr/bin/env python 
# Python Network Programming Cookbook -- Chapter - 5 
# This program requires Python 3.5.2 or any later version 
# It may run on any other version with/without modifications. 
# 
# Follow the comments inline to make it run on Python...