PERL and HTML

vashbrowns has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: PERL and HTML by bradcathey (Prior) on Apr 19, 2006 at 00:28 UTC
You're on the right "track," so to speak. CGI is the ticket...with one exception. You may want to look at a templating module like HTML::Template (hopefully it will be installed on your web host) for returning the data to the HTML page. Burying your HTML in the CGI may be instructive, but H::T may be easier to adapt from whatever Dreamweaver generates. To return HTML results from CGI will require not only a knowledge of HTML, but of a more obfuscated version in CGI. —Brad "The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men." George Eliot	[reply]
Re: PERL and HTML by GrandFather (Saint) on Apr 19, 2006 at 00:37 UTC
Seems to me you are asking these questions too late, but maybe your course intends to simulate the pressure of trying to write something against an unrealistic deadline with unfamiliar tools? However, you have come to the right place to get some help sorting out your problems. Your first task though is to do a little research. Take a look around CPAN for modules that mention HTML and Template in their names. Also take a look there for CGI and Template or Form related modules. Good luck with the project (and try to fit some sleep in somewhere along the way). DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel	[reply]
Re: PERL and HTML by spiritway (Vicar) on Apr 19, 2006 at 05:13 UTC
I would caution you about using WYSIWYG editors for HTML. I don't know how DreamWeaver does, but many HTML editors create such convoluted HTML that it's almost impossible to go on there and tweak it. I've found that I almost always have to tweak the HTML that's generated, so this might be a problem for you. This might not even apply with DreamWeaver; and it might be such a good program that you never have to tweak the HTML. But just keep this in mind as you're choosing your tools.	[reply]
Re^2: PERL and HTML by bowei_99 (Friar) on Apr 19, 2006 at 05:28 UTC
I would caution you about using WYSIWYG editors for HTML. I would agree with that, but having used Dreamweaver pretty extensively in the past, I've found it good for mockups, and it doesn't muck up your code by adding in superfluous tags like MS Word or Frontpage does. Since it's probably due in a couple weeks anyway, he could just download a trial version, too, if cost is an object. Besides, it sounds like in the OP's situation, getting something together quick in Dreamweaver and tweaking it is probably easier than doing it by hand, especially considering he doesn't know HTML very well, and it doesn't seem to be the focus of the class. -- Burvil	[reply]
Re: PERL and HTML by chas (Priest) on Apr 19, 2006 at 01:54 UTC
What has been said already, but a few comments: You can use Dreamweaver or some other editor to create the initial webpage with form where the user's data is entered. The form should call your cgi script using the form "action". If you don't actually need to recreate the original page you could just have your script print out the results between `<pre> </pre>` tags. (This will appear on a new page. You also need the opening and closing html tags, but no other tags.) (Getting your script in the right place with the right permissions executable by a web user and a page which is writable by the script to hold the results is part of the problem but separate from the perl programming part.)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: PERL and HTML by CountZero (Bishop) on Apr 19, 2006 at 05:48 UTC
Personally, I use Nvu as my favourite HTML-editor. It's free, it works on multiple platforms and its HTML-code is relatively straightforward and clean and therefore easy to "cut-and-paste" into your scripts or templates. For an entry into CGI, there is of course no way around Ovid's CGI-course. If you have any specific questions, you will find Perlmonks a good place to ask them. Please, ask only specific questions, add some code you have written, show the Monastery you made a genuine effort of finding a solution and you will find the Monks most helpful. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]
Re: PERL and HTML by planetscape (Chancellor) on Apr 19, 2006 at 07:50 UTC
Kudos to you for starting this while there are a few weeks left before it's due. ;-) I really like Arachnophilia for creating clean, straightforward HTML. If you are stuck using something (like FrontPage), that adds a lot of extraneous tags, I recommend HTML Tidy for cleaning up the mess. HTH, planetscape	[reply]
Re: PERL and HTML by holli (Abbot) on Apr 19, 2006 at 07:51 UTC
I know nothing about HTML. Depending on your native language you might look at Selfhtml, a very good online html documentation. Sadly the english translation is far from being complete, but the german (original), french and spanish versions are not. holli, /regexed monk/	[reply]
Re: PERL and HTML by jonadab (Parson) on Apr 19, 2006 at 12:24 UTC
Do not use DreamWeaver. Do not use DreamWeaver. That way might seem easier, but down that path you will find pain and suffering, because the HTML that you get out of DreamWeaver will be very hard to break into manageable pieces and integrate with the logic in your Perl script. You can teach yourself enough HTML to get this done in about an hour using information that is available on the web. This is not very much more time than it would take to learn DreamWeaver, and the resulting HTML will be MUCH easier to work with and to integrate into your Perl code. HTML is very easy to learn, and will take much less time and effort than you spent learning Perl, to say nothing of Java or C++. An intelligent person with a natural bent toward computers can master HTML in a long weekend, and you don't need to master it; you just need to learn the basics. Yes, CGI is the way to go for this. You will use a form element in your HTML, which will contain the various inputs, including a submit button. The action attribute of the form element will point to your Perl script. There are various CGI-related modules on the CPAN (see search.cpan.org), which you can use to get the form input. Some of them (for instance, CGI.pm) have complex interfaces for things like generating HTML, but you can safely ignore all of that. The only thing you need them for is to collect the form input. For generating the HTML, it's much easier to just learn HTML and use print statements (maybe with heredocs and/or the qq[somestring] quoting mechanism, since the strings you are printing will often contain quotation marks). As far as sending the results back to the browser, the most important thing to know is that you have to print out the HTTP headers first, then a blank line, then whatever HTML you want to send. The only HTTP header that is mandatory is the Content-type header, which will look probably like this: `Content-type: text/html\n` Enjoy this assignment. You've waited to the last second, but nonetheless writing CGI scripts is one of the easier and more pleasant programming assignments you could be given. Once you've written one of them, it becomes easy to whip together another one real quick sometime later. Before you know it you'll be doing your layouts with stylesheets, scripting events with Javascript, manipulating page elements via the DOM, and loading in parts of pages dynamically with XMLHttpRequest. But for now, just do the basic CGI script.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: PERL and HTML by zentara (Cardinal) on Apr 19, 2006 at 12:24 UTC
If you are starting out in cgi, don't overlook "here docs" for printing out html manually from a cgi script. They are very handy, because they allow you to output html just as you would statically write it, and embed variables into it. As an example, this will output code for a javascript popup `#!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use CGI qw(:standard); use strict; print header(); print <<HERE; <html> <head> <title>test of javascript</title> <script language="JavaScript"> <!-- Begin function launchwin() { window.open("../jspopup.html", "dialog", "width=300, height=250, scrol +lbars=yes, resizable=yes"); } // End --> </script> </head> <body> <center> <form> <input type=button value="Click here to try the JavaScript!" onClick="launchwin()"> </form> </center> </body> </html> HERE` [download] and here is a simple thank you page `print <<END_HTML; Content-type: text/html <HTML> <HEAD> <TITLE>Thanks!</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgcolor="#ffffff"><br> <P>Thanks for visiting our site : $username!</P> </BODY> </HTML> END_HTML` [download] I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. flash japh	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: PERL and HTML by SamCG (Hermit) on Apr 19, 2006 at 21:28 UTC
"supposed to figure out what his cheapest OR fastest choice of travel is" Haaahahahahaaaa! I guess your professor hasn't spent a lot of time with the "scheduling" of the NYC subway system. Or, for that matter, knows that there's one rate and transfers are free. Or maybe this is kind of a tongue-in-cheek question ;). I've never found Dreamweaver to be that bad in terms of producing reasonable HTML, but you don't need it (and I'm not even sure it's really helpful) for this project. I think you could safely go either way. update: Oh, and there's a secret, by the way. Shhhhhhhh. . . it's "Perl", not "PERL" (not critiquing -- just mentioning something that commonly grates on the nerves of some. . .) ----------------- _{s''limp';@p=split '!','n!h!p!';s,m,s,;$s=y;$c=slice @p1;so brutally;d;$n=reverse;$c=$s**$#p;print(''.$c^chop($n))while($c/=$#p)>=1;}	[reply]