A Native Fortran-77 CGI Interface

We want to pass input parameters and upload a file from a web browser to an f77 fortran program on an Apache web server, but were unable to find much usefull information about doing so. Our goal is to use no libraries, no Perl, and nothing beyond standard f77 just as it comes with FreeBSD. There are some limitations due to the lack of generality in f77 I/O, but it does do what we need quite straightforwardly and in only a few lines of code. It is also quite secure - there are no buffer overflows possible.

Parameter passing

Here is an example of a page asking for two numeric values,passing them to a fortran program which writes an HTML response:

Here is test1.for a program that converts the string to a namelist, and reads that.

Since we only use numeric values in the example, the program is rather specialized! If you need text values, the values in the namelist will need to be quoted. I"ll discuss a better method for passing stings below. There is the possibility that the browser will present the values in some other order - there is an option "tabindex" to prevent this, but I haven't needed it yet with recent versions of Safari, MSIE and Firefox, the only browsers I have tested.

Uploading files

We also need to let users upload an ASCII text file. Files are passed as MIME attachments to the standard input but is still quite simple. Here is the html for an example:

I prepared a test file for uploading consisting of three lines "line 1", "line 2", and "line 3". Here is the result returned, as prepared by the browser for the CGI program:

The first line establishes the file separator string, then several header lines descrbe what is being transmitted, then a blank line to signal end of headers, then the file itself, and then the file separator again (plus 2 more dashes). The 72 character input buffer wasn't long enough to hold the 2nd header line with the file name, so that was truncated and reading resumed after the newline.

There is a nusisance problem here that isn't obvious from running the test program above. The browser sends the file with a line ending convention crlf or (hex) 0d0a, while our server is Unix, which uses a single character (0a). f77 doesn't discard the 0d when reading, so each line will end with 0d. Reading a null line into a character variable gives you an 0d right filled with spaces. In practice I have found that the code snippet:

I have tested this on our FreeBSD systems with MSIE and Firefox, with f77 and g95. A correspondent points out that gfortran will choke when asked to read an "a" format item that streches beyond the end-of-line. Instead of copying the available characters up to the end of line it continues to read onto the next line. This would make that compiler unsuitable for this purpose.

Variable length text fields

We do need to read variable length parameter fields. The trick is to use the "multi-part/form-data" MIME type, to separate the text and numeric fields onto separate lines, and then use a fortran free-format read on the data lines (skipping the headers). This form type also allows for uploading files. An example:

Comments, suggestions and links are very welcome, please write to me at the address below. I am especially interested in the extent to which these techniques are browser, server, or compiler specific, or otherwise limited. Also, I expect that there may be some way to avoid the line ending problems that I am not aware of - if you know, I hope you will inform me.

Russell Hyer has sent an example of reading variables from the Linux environment which however does require a non-standard (but common) "getenv" system function.

I have heard from Clive Page that on his system the web page isn't sent to the browser till the Fortran program ends:

I've tried all those things - closing the output, flushing it, etc. I've tried 3 compilers (g95, gfortran, and Nag) and all can close standard output as far as I can tell. I am pretty sure that the CGI output isn't declared to be complete until the process exits. So even if you send and might expect the page to be finished, the user sees the browser showing a busy condition, right until the CGI process (and any subprocesses) finally exit. That may be a function of our web server (Apache).

Another correspondent reports that his Intel compiler read statement is unable to read the standard input from the Microsoft web server. However, the getc function does work for him.

Recently I have been working with this and found the content-type line no longer showing the field name. I am not sure why this is so. Also, I notice that unchecked checkboxes do not show up in the standard input at all - making checkboxes unusable. Radioboxes do work.

An online version of echo.for is available at http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/fortran-cgi/echo.cgi (not a hot link) where you can use it for testing purposes. Just change the href in your web page to point to that page and and our server will echo back to you whatever the browser sends it. Sort of like a reverse "show source".

Daniel Feenberg
National Bureau of Economic Research
617-588-0343
feenberg isat nber dotte org

Sources and more information:

1. rfc3875 is the official CGI interface documentation
2. Mime form data type documentation
3. Format of Internet Message Bodies
4. modern Fortran example
5. A fortran 90 interface to CGI
6. CGI with environment variables
7. Another example
8. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3875.txt
9. https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/cgi.html
10. A C-language interface callable from Fortran 77
11. Fortran with AJAX
12. Using gfortran extensions
13. A translation into Serbo-Croation by Jovana Milutinovich of this article.
14. A translation into Ukrainian by Agnessa Petrova of this article.
15. A translation into Bulgarian by Artem Delik of this article.
16. A better introduction han this one to the same topic.

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    Last revised July 19, 2021 by DRF