Stripping CGI.pm tags

[ldude7]

I have a big legacy app with a bunch of CGI.pm tags like: li(font({-face=>'verdana, arial, sans-serif', -color=>'red'}, $errorstring))

However, I have been tasked with redesigning the site, and need to be able to do most of the styling with CSS. I'm kind of stumped on a clean way to clean them up. My first stab was to try a simple regex:

find . |xargs grep -l 'font' | xargs 
perl -ne 'if(s/font\s*\(([^()]+)\)  )/<span class="$1"/g) {print;}'

However, that seems to be heading somewhere int he right direction, but not really what I want. A better approach may be to split up the tags and just dump portions in a class (perhaps something like <li><span class="verdana red">$errorstring</span></li>

Is there a simple way to do that in regex? Or is there a better approach to cleaning up the cgi.pm code?

[f00li5h]

you could play with CGI.pm's innards to get a stack trace when font is called...

use CGI::Carp qw[ confess ];
my $old_font = \&CGI::font;
*CGI::font = sub { confess "font here!"; $old_font(@_) };

or you can just replace it with a sub that returns a "<span class=""> with the class determined by what's passed in...

(udpate: this does involve you editing the code manually though)