Perl in .PHP File

gmyachtsman

I am wondering whether I can use a .php extension for a web page that is running Perl -- my thought being this:

maybe if I use .PHP for my Perl page now I won't lose my search engine listings if I switch to PHP in the future.

archangel_617b

You can tell Apache to parse any file extension as PHP (and assumedly as Perl instead) so don't worry about it. One site I'm working on uses .uro and .class for all the source files handled by the web server and no extension for any of the scripts.

gmyachtsman

Thanks, archangel_617b.

I had forgotten about that possibility to change the .htaccess to read the file as .php !

But I believe there may be one problem with that approach -- if, for instance, the file in question is a .cgi file (or any other particular file extension) and I alter the .htaccess to read it as a .php file, then .htaccess reads all the files of that kind as .php files on the whole website (at least when I altered the settings through my control panel at hostrocket). If I leave it to be read as both a .php file and a .cgi file, I get an error message.

I think there is a way to change the .htaccess for each file directory, rather than the whole website (though I can't do that through my IP's control panel).

But the ability to make that change is perhaps a good reason to name a file with an off-beat extension (although it creates a little more work, it is also fun). Maybe I'll do that!

archangel_617b

Mixing and matching would always be a problem and there isn't much you can do about that save port all the code at once. Tricky and exciting.

If you're in 'nix, then you can at least offload a lot of functionality to executable scripts since they can be #!'d into any environment they want and nobody has to know.