CGI::Pretty(3pm)

1CGI::Pretty(3)        User Contributed Perl Documentation       CGI::Pretty(3)
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NAME

6       CGI::Pretty - module to produce nicely formatted HTML code
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SYNOPSIS

9           use CGI::Pretty qw( :html3 );
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11           # Print a table with a single data element
12           print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );
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DESCRIPTION

15       CGI::Pretty is a module that derives from CGI.  It's sole function is
16       to allow users of CGI to output nicely formatted HTML code.
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18       When using the CGI module, the following code:
19           print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );
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21       produces the following output:
22           <TABLE><TR><TD>foo</TD></TR></TABLE>
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24       If a user were to create a table consisting of many rows and many
25       columns, the resultant HTML code would be quite difficult to read since
26       it has no carriage returns or indentation.
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28       CGI::Pretty fixes this problem.  What it does is add a carriage return
29       and indentation to the HTML code so that one can easily read it.
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31           print table( TR( td( "foo" ) ) );
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33       now produces the following output:
34           <TABLE>
35              <TR>
36                 <TD>foo</TD>
37              </TR>
38           </TABLE>
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40   Recommendation for when to use CGI::Pretty
41       CGI::Pretty is far slower than using CGI.pm directly. A benchmark
42       showed that it could be about 10 times slower. Adding newlines and
43       spaces may alter the rendered appearance of HTML. Also, the extra
44       newlines and spaces also make the file size larger, making the files
45       take longer to download.
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47       With all those considerations, it is recommended that CGI::Pretty be
48       used primarily for debugging.
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50   Tags that won't be formatted
51       The following tags are not formatted: <a>, <pre>, <code>, <script>,
52       <textarea>, and <td>.  If these tags were formatted, the user would see
53       the extra indentation on the web browser causing the page to look
54       different than what would be expected.  If you wish to add more tags to
55       the list of tags that are not to be touched, push them onto the @AS_IS
56       array:
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58           push @CGI::Pretty::AS_IS,qw(XMP);
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60   Customizing the Indenting
61       If you wish to have your own personal style of indenting, you can
62       change the $INDENT variable:
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64           $CGI::Pretty::INDENT = "\t\t";
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66       would cause the indents to be two tabs.
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68       Similarly, if you wish to have more space between lines, you may change
69       the $LINEBREAK variable:
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71           $CGI::Pretty::LINEBREAK = "\n\n";
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73       would create two carriage returns between lines.
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75       If you decide you want to use the regular CGI indenting, you can easily
76       do the following:
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78           $CGI::Pretty::INDENT = $CGI::Pretty::LINEBREAK = "";
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AUTHOR

81       Brian Paulsen <Brian@ThePaulsens.com>, with minor modifications by
82       Lincoln Stein <lstein@cshl.org> for incorporation into the CGI.pm
83       distribution.
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85       Copyright 1999, Brian Paulsen.  All rights reserved.
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87       This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
88       under the same terms as Perl itself.
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90       Bug reports and comments to Brian@ThePaulsens.com.  You can also write
91       to lstein@cshl.org, but this code looks pretty hairy to me and I'm not
92       sure I understand it!
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NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

AUTHOR

SEE ALSO