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CGI::Pretty(3)         Perl Programmers Reference Guide         CGI::Pretty(3)



NAME
       CGI::Pretty - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code

SYNOPSIS
           use CGI::Pretty qw( :html3 );

           # Print a table with a single data element
           print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );

DESCRIPTION
       CGI::Pretty is a module that derives from CGI.  It's sole function is
       to allow users(1,5) of CGI to output nicely formatted HTML code.

       When using the CGI module, the following code:
           print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );

       produces the following output:
           <TABLE><TR><TD>foo</TD></TR></TABLE>

       If a user were to create a table consisting of many rows and many col-
       umns, the resultant HTML code would be quite difficult to read(2,n,1 builtins) since it
       has no carriage returns or indentation.

       CGI::Pretty fixes this problem.  What it does is add a carriage return
       and indentation to the HTML code so that one can easily read(2,n,1 builtins) it.

           print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );

       now produces the following output:
           <TABLE>
              <TR>
                 <TD>
                    foo
                 </TD>
              </TR>
           </TABLE>

       Tags that won't be formatted

       The <A> and <PRE> tags are not formatted.  If these tags were format-
       ted, the user would see the extra indentation on the web browser caus-
       ing the page to look(1,8,3 Search::Dict) different than what would be expected.  If you
       wish to add more tags to the list of tags that are not to be touched,
       push them onto the @AS_IS array:

           push @CGI::Pretty::AS_IS,qw(CODE XMP);

       Customizing the Indenting

       If you wish to have your own personal style of indenting, you can
       change the $INDENT variable:

           $CGI::Pretty::INDENT = "\t\t";

       would cause the indents to be two tabs.

       Similarly, if(3,n) you wish to have more space between lines, you may change
       the $LINEBREAK variable:

           $CGI::Pretty::LINEBREAK = "\n\n";

       would create two carriage returns between lines.

       If you decide you want to use the regular CGI indenting, you can easily
       do the following:

           $CGI::Pretty::INDENT = $CGI::Pretty::LINEBREAK = "";

BUGS
       This section intentionally left blank.

AUTHOR
       Brian Paulsen <Brian@ThePaulsens.com>, with minor modifications by Lin-
       coln Stein <lstein@cshl.org> for incorporation into the CGI.pm distri-
       bution.

       Copyright 1999, Brian Paulsen.  All rights reserved.

       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
       under the same terms as Perl itself.

       Bug reports and comments to Brian@ThePaulsens.com.  You can also write(1,2)
       to lstein@cshl.org, but this code looks pretty hairy to me and I'm not
       sure I understand it!

SEE ALSO
       CGI



perl v5.8.5                       2001-09-21                    CGI::Pretty(3)