Re: Problems printing to browser

[frankus]

Just a point of preference but:
Try replacing:

my $tags ='';
if ($form{'abstract'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="abstract" content="$form{'abstract'}"><br
+>\n);
}
if ($form{'author'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="author" content="$form{'author'}"><br>\n)
+;
}
if ($form{'distributor'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="distributor" content="$form{'distributor'
+}"><br>\n);
}
if ($form{'copyright'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="copyright" content="$form{'copyright'}"><
+br>\n);
}
if ($form{'keywords'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="keywords" content="$form{'keywords'}"><br
+>\n);
}
if ($form{'description'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="description" content="$form{'description'
+}"><br>\n);
}

$tags .=  qq(<meta name="generator" content="SpyderTagV1.0!"><br>\n);

if ($form{'robots'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="robots" content="$form{'robots'}"><br>\n)
+;
}
if ($form{'language'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="language" content="$form{'language'}"><br
+>\n);
}
if ($form{'distribution'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="distribution" content="$form{'distributio
+n'}"><br>\n);
}
if ($form{'rating'} ne "") {
    $tags .=  qq(<meta name="rating" content="$form{'rating'}"><br>\n)
+;
}

print my $cgi->escapeHTML( $tags);

With:

print my $cgi->escapeHTML(
  join '', ( 
    map{
      defined($form{$_}) ? qq(<meta name="$_" content="$form{$_}"><br>
+\n):''
    } qw ( abstract author distributor copyright description 
           robots language distribution rating )         
  ),'<meta name="generator" content="SpyderTagV1.0!"><br>\n'
);

Explanation This uses the functional programming idiom, so start from the inner-most loop and work back.

• Use the qw function to produce an array of string items for everything in brackets. In this case a list of all the names of the elements from the %form hash
• Use the map function to process each element of the array produced by 'qw'. Map makes a list of all the results in order.
• Using a ternary operator to return a value: the string if the form item is defined, no text if not.
• Join all the array elements from the 'map' function. Also join the string outside the brackets for the map function.
• Finally print the escapeHTML'd version of the returned string from the join.

Other "useful" notes:

• Use single quotes where possible, ie where variables don't need to be interpolated.

One of the first things I learnt in Perl was to recognise repetitive patterns and then get rid of them.
I'm lazy.
A by product is if you want to add more meta fields it's easier now :)

--

Brother Frankus.

¤