This is a complicated question.

Efficiency of speed, development time, maintainability, ease of use, or what, in particular?

How efficient is your current approach in any or all of the above ways that matter? How efficient does it need to be? Can you consider other approaches if they lead to dramatic improvements in one or more of the criteria above?

Most likely, use a template system will cost a little bit more execution time, however to fulfill a HTTP request, you have to spend time for lots of other activities, two big ones would be: network communication, and database access (if there is any).

Instead of looking at the time the templating system use, you better look at the percentage of time used by the templating system, compare to the entire cycle of fulfilling the request.

More importantly, as chromatic pointed out, how easily the application can be developed and maintained is very important, actually more important. With a reasonablly good templating system, most likely you can develop the application in a short time, with a clearer face, and the maintainability is improved.

Designing, writing, testing and using your very own yet another templating system is hugely inefficient. Likewise doing the same with formats doesn't help a lot either.

If you need things to go fast perhaps you should look at CGI::Fast or mod_perl. That'll cut down the execution time a lot.

Back to the question at hand, however. I would recommend the good practice of using someone else's already well designed, written and tested templating system. For example HTML::Template or Template::Toolkit depending on which one best suits your needs.

Formats are almost a thing of the past (thankfully) and I can say with certainty that you'll appreciate the joys of using templates, sooner or later. You want to use templates, it's a good habit to get into for when you later have to share a project with a graphic designer.

Hope this helps,

jarich

There's a process you go through when working with Perl and HTML, unless you're really lucky, and it's like this:

1. Using hundreds of horrible print statements, all of which neeed to have all the quotes escaped
2. Using "print qq" instead
3. Using HERE documents or subs
4. Using your own templating system
5. Throwing your own templating system away and using HTML::Template

print <<OUT;
First line!
This line has a $var in it.
Second line...
Thanks for reading this!
OUT
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use strict;
use warnings;

my ($handle, $text, $insert);

open($handle, 'template.txt');
read($handle, $text, 10000);
close($handle);

$insert = index($text, '<!-- INSERT -->');

print substr($text, 0, $insert);
print 'My inserted data goes here!';
print substr($text, $insert);
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Blah blah blah
I'm inserting a variable here: <?php echo $var; ?>
And again here: <?php echo $another; ?>
[download]