CGI::Pretty(3)                 User Contributed Perl Documentation                 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 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 indenta-
       tion.

       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);

       Customizing the Indenting

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

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

SEE ALSO
       CGI



perl v5.8.8                                 2005-04-07                             CGI::Pretty(3)