


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


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 of CGI to output nicely format-
       ted 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 columns, the resultant HTML code would be quite
       difficult to read 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 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 formatted, the user would see the extra indentation
       on the web browser causing the page to look 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);






2001-05-24                 perl v5.6.1                          1





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


       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 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 modifi-
       cations by Lincoln Stein <lstein@cshl.org> for incorpora-
       tion into the CGI.pm distribution.

       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 to lstein@cshl.org, but this code looks
       pretty hairy to me and I'm not sure I understand it!

SEE ALSO
       the CGI manpage
















2001-05-24                 perl v5.6.1                          2


