#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $total_sites = 20;
my $rows = 4;
print qq|
<table border="1" width="100%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">\n
<tr>\n|;
for my $i (1 .. $total_sites) {
    print "\t<td>number: [$i]</td>\n";
    print "</tr>\n<tr>\n" unless ($i % $rows || $i == $total_sites);
}
print "</tr>\n\n</table>\n";

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Wow that works great thanks sooo much :)

Frankly, though, you have hit one of my great pet peeves. Embedding printing (ie. heredocs, html, forms) in the perl only leads to serious maintenance issues. Good job security, but bad style.

At the very least, look into using CGI.pm; however, I recommend that you use a module specific to template processsing. I prefer Template Toolkit but there are several of them. If you are not familiar with what templates are, its a good time learn. You won't regret it.

(Plus, don't you just hate having to escape all the quotes. Use qq(foo) instead.))

I usually use blah <<"END; Is there any difference between that and qq?

Not much, but you can use them in different ways.

e.g. you can do this:

print qq{the "cat" sat {furrily} on the 'so-called' mat};
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without having to escape any of the quotes, or the brackets.

The same is true of a here document (e.g. <<"END") of course, in fact that's more adaptable because it can contain anything at all (except \nEND, obviously), but it takes more than one line.

hth,
andy.

On the first pass $row_count is incremented to 2. After that it always remains 2. So the above elsif will only be executed when $rows is set to 2.

As for the TD tags they're set to 100% because of the fact that you can specify how many blocks there are in a row I want them to all have the same size. Which means that if there's 2 blocks in the row at 100% the blocks each take 50% of the page. Works a treat in opera but netscape 4.78 doesn't seem to like it very much, I have an example of what I'm trying to do at http://geocities.com/rendler/news.html

Set the <table> to your desired width, and the browser will spread the available space evenly if not told otherwise.

Uhm.. oh dear :---)

From just a quick glance at your code:

• Arrays start at 0, not at 1 (you can do the latter, but hell will have you for it, so stay away)

• You should nearly always use foreach (@list) rather than for($i;$c;$n) - even if you really need a counter,

  foreach my $i (0 .. 100)
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  is better than the corresponding for(;;) construct. It is more efficient (yes, it is), and it removes fencepost errors - you cannot make a mistake on the condition that checks whether you have arrived on your last iteration. With the for(;;) form it is common to overlook nasty special cases that make the loop run once too much or too little.

  Having said that, it is even better to do

  foreach my $element (@array) { print $element; }
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  than

  foreach my $i (0 .. 9) { print $array[$i] }
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  If you really really need the $i for other purposes besides accessing the @array, it is often still better to do something like

  my $i = 0;
  foreach my $element (@array) { print "$i $element"; $i++ }
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  or maybe

  my $i = -1;
  foreach my $element (@array) { $i++; print "$element $i"; }
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You should really check out Mark-Jason Dominus's excellent program repair shop series on www.perl.com. There is some very helpful advice there to get you started on writing better Perl.