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



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 AT ThePaulsens.com>, with minor modifications by Lincoln Stein
       <lstein AT 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 AT ThePaulsens.com.  You can also write to lstein AT cshl.org,
       but this code looks pretty hairy to me and I'm not sure I understand it!

SEE ALSO
       CGI



perl v5.20.2                                2014-12-27                         CGI::Pretty(3perl)