Skip to Main Content
Perl for Web Site Management
book

Perl for Web Site Management

by John Callender
October 2001
Beginner content levelBeginner
528 pages
15h 20m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Perl for Web Site Management

Generating the Top-level Page

We’re almost done. All that’s left is to generate the site’s top-level page. Here’s the code that does that:

# write out the top-level page

my $path      = "$base_path/index.html";
my $title     = "$show_name Exhibitor Listings";
my $alpha_bar = &make_alpha_bar;
my $date      = localtime;
my $count     = keys %listing; # how many exhibitors, total?

my $content   = <<"EOF";
<H2 ALIGN="center">$show_name Exhibitor Listings</H2>

<P ALIGN="center"><EM>Last updated $date<BR>
$count exhibitors total</EM></P>

<P><STRONG>Alphabetical Index:</STRONG></P>

$alpha_bar

<P><STRONG>Category Index:</STRONG></P>

<UL>
$cat_list
</UL>
EOF

&write_page($path, $title, $content);

There are just a few new tricks here. First, we make an alpha bar for the top-level page, but we don’t pass the subroutine a letter as an argument, so the alpha bar we get back does not have any unlinked letters.

Next, we populate the $date variable, which we’ll use to put a timestamp on the top-level page, by assigning the output of Perl’s localtime function to it. The localtime function is interesting because it behaves differently depending on whether it is in a scalar or an array context. If you put it in an array context (by assigning its output to an array variable, for example), it will return a list of various elements relating to the current date and time. If you put it in a scalar context, though (as we’ve done here, by assigning its output to a scalar variable), it returns a string describing the current ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Web Client Programming with Perl

Web Client Programming with Perl

Clinton Wong
Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason

Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason

Ken Williams, Dave Rolsky

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565926471Catalog PageErrata