CGI::Pretty(3) Perl Programmers Reference Guide CGI::Pretty(3)NAMECGI::Pretty - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code
SYNOPSIS
use CGI::Pretty qw( :html3 );
# Print a table with a single data element
print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );
DESCRIPTIONCGI::Pretty is a module that derives from CGI. It's sole
function is to allow users of CGI to output nicely format
ted HTML code.
When using the CGI module, the following code:
print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );
produces the following output:
<TABLE><TR><TD>foo</TD></TR></TABLE>
If a user were to create a table consisting of many rows
and many columns, the resultant HTML code would be quite
difficult to read since it has no carriage returns or
indentation.
CGI::Pretty fixes this problem. What it does is add a
carriage return and indentation to the HTML code so that
one can easily read it.
print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );
now produces the following output:
<TABLE>
<TR>
<TD>
foo
</TD>
</TR>
</TABLE>
Tags that won't be formatted
The <A> and <PRE> tags are not formatted. If these tags
were formatted, the user would see the extra indentation
on the web browser causing the page to look different than
what would be expected. If you wish to add more tags to
the list of tags that are not to be touched, push them
onto the "@AS_IS" array:
push @CGI::Pretty::AS_IS,qw(CODE XMP);
Customizing the Indenting
If you wish to have your own personal style of indenting,
you can change the "$INDENT" variable:
$CGI::Pretty::INDENT = "\t\t";
would cause the indents to be two tabs.
Similarly, if you wish to have more space between lines,
you may change the "$LINEBREAK" variable:
$CGI::Pretty::LINEBREAK = "\n\n";
would create two carriage returns between lines.
If you decide you want to use the regular CGI indenting,
you can easily do the following:
$CGI::Pretty::INDENT = $CGI::Pretty::LINEBREAK = "";
BUGS
This section intentionally left blank.
AUTHOR
Brian Paulsen <Brian@ThePaulsens.com>, with minor modifi
cations by Lincoln Stein <lstein@cshl.org> for incorpora
tion into the CGI.pm distribution.
Copyright 1999, Brian Paulsen. All rights reserved.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it
and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
Bug reports and comments to Brian@ThePaulsens.com. You
can also write to lstein@cshl.org, but this code looks
pretty hairy to me and I'm not sure I understand it!
SEE ALSO
the CGI manpage
2001-02-22 perl v5.6.1 CGI::Pretty(3)