Perl requires the DBI database interface to connect to MySQL. You can get it from CPAN:
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install dbi
install DBD::mysql
This will get you the DBI interface and the MySQL information it needs to work.
The DBI interface is object-oriented, and returns handles to various objects or arrays. In Perl, queries must be “prepared” before they are executed. The fetchrow_hashref() method is the equivalent of PHP’s mysql_fetch_array() function. It returns a handle to an associative array. You need to dereference the handle using double dollar signs.
#!/usr/bin/perl
use DBI;
$driver = "mysql";
$host = "localhost";
$port = 3306;
$user = "Username";
$pass = "Password";
$database = "music";
$query = "SELECT album, artist, year, rating FROM albums ORDER BY artist";
$dataSource = "DBI:$driver:database=$database;host=$host;port=$port";
print "<html>\n";
print "<head><title>My Albums</title></head>\n";
print "<body>\n";
print "<h1>My Albums</h1>\n";
print "<table>\n";
print "<tr><th>Album</th><th>Artist</th><th>Year</th><th>Rating</th></tr>\n";
if ($databaseHandle = DBI->connect($dataSource, $user, $pass)) {
if ($queryHandle = $databaseHandle->prepare($query)) {
if ($queryHandle->execute) {
while ($rowHandle = $queryHandle->fetchrow_hashref()) {
$album = $$rowHandle{'album'};
$artist = $$rowHandle{'artist'};
$year = $$rowHandle{'year'};
$rating = $$rowHandle{'rating'};
print "<tr>";
print "<th>$album</th><td>$artist</td><td>$year</td><td>$rating</td>";
print "</tr>\n";
}
} else {
print "Unable to execute query $query: $!\n";
}
$queryHandle->finish;
} else {
print "Unable to prepare query $query: $!\n";
}
$databaseHandle->disconnect;
} else {
print "Unable to connect to data souce $dataSource: $!\n";
}
print "</table>\n";
print "</body>\n";
print "</html>\n";
