trusty (3) CGI::Pretty.3perl.gz

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 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 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>

   Recommendation for when to use CGI::Pretty
       CGI::Pretty is far slower than using CGI.pm directly. A benchmark showed that it could be about 10 times
       slower. Adding newlines and spaces may alter the rendered appearance of HTML. Also, the extra newlines
       and spaces also make the file size larger, making the files take longer to download.

       With all those considerations, it is recommended that CGI::Pretty be used primarily for debugging.

   Tags that won't be formatted
       The following tags are not formatted: <a>, <pre>, <code>, <script>, <textarea>, and <td>.  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(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 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 = "";

AUTHOR

       Brian Paulsen <Brian@ThePaulsens.com>, with minor modifications by Lincoln Stein <lstein@cshl.org> for
       incorporation 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

       CGI