http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=68570


in reply to My April Fools Prank is

April Fool's silliness
Below is some code that formats tables -- shades alternate rows -- used in an intranet application internally...
yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the code is ugly, but it works, and I didn't know much perl when I wrote it... so please be gentle on this old code!....
Anyway, on April Fools, I set  $silly to true using  rand about 1 in 10 times.... truly horrible.

nop
sub table { my $html = shift; my $i=1; $html =~ s{<\s*(t\w+)}{ if (lc($1) eq "tr") {$i++; "<tr";} elsif (lc($1) eq "td") { (($i%2) == 1) ? '<td bgcolor="#F4FAFF" align="center"' : '<td bgcolor="#E1f1FF" align="center"';} elsif (lc($1) eq "th") { (($i%2) == 1) ? '<th bgcolor="#F4FAFF" align="center"' : '<th bgcolor="#E1f1FF" align="center"';} else {"<$1"} }iegm; if (!$silly) {return $html;} my $dir; $html =~ s{<td.*?>(.*?)<\/td>}{ $dir = (qw(left right up down))[rand()*4]; if (rand()<.2) { "<td><marquee direction=\"$dir\" behavior=\"alternate\" height +=\"40\" vspace=\"2\">$1</marquee></td>"; } else { "<td>$1</td>"; } }ieg; return $html; }