Displaying an array in a cgi generated textarea

[martymart]

Fellow Monks,
I have a text file that I'd like to display in a form textarea. I read this file into an array @source, and put that into the textarea of my cgi script...

use CGI;
$co=new CGI;
#some code here
$co->center($co->textarea
(
-name=>'textarea',
-default=>"@source",
-rows=>20,
-columns=>80,
)),
#other code here

The problem is that while the first line displays fine, all the subsequent lines are shifted to the right by one space. I think it may be because the array is in between quotation marks (I could be wrong though!). However, when I get rid of the quotation marks it really messes up the order of the elements in the array. It seems to display to the text area like this:
print "@source";
and what I want it to do is display the array like this:
print @source;
I'd appreciate an ideas or suggestions.
Martymart

[fruiture]

An array in double quotes (which equals qq//) is interpolated and the result is ...

print "left @array right";
# try perl -MO=Deparse for that:
print 'left '.join($",@array).' right'

So you see, perl uses $" as the seperator of the array elements, $" is by default just a single space character, you can simply change that. Use local() to avoid problems with other code, because CGI.pm afaik uses $", too.

local $" = '';
#...
-default => "@source",
#...

#or even

-default => do { local $" = ''; "@source" },

#or better

-default => join('',@source)

HTH, see perlvar

--
http://fruiture.de

[martymart]

Thanks fruiture,
just tried it... works great,
valuable lesson learned...
Martymart

[pfaut]

When you read the file into the array, you read the line terminators as well. Those line terminators start a new line in the textarea, too. When you interpolated the array into a string with -default=>"@source", perl used the value of $" (a space by default) to separate the elements. This is where the extra space came from on the second and subsequent lines.

There are a couple of ways I can think of to fix this. Choose one of these to suit your tastes.

• Use chomp @source to remove the newline characters before interpolating into the string. This will allow the textarea to rewrap the text.
• Set $" to an empty string before the interpolation. This will keep the current line breaks when loaded into the textarea. You might want to use local ($") = "" here. The local will reset $" back to its previous value when your program leaves the current scope.

---
print map { my ($m)=1<<hex($_)&11?' ':'';
$m.=substr('AHJPacehklnorstu',hex($_),1) }
split //,'2fde0abe76c36c914586c';