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

Adding Link Checking

We’re going to put just one more little embellishment into the make_page.cgi script. At the end of the &regenerate_links process, it would be nice to run the quick-and-dirty version of the link-checking script we saw back in Chapter 11 (the one that just checked for breakage in links pointing to files in the local filesystem). The idea here is that the user has just added some pages to the site, with IMG and A tags pointing to other files on the site, and it would be nice to run a quick check to let the user know if any of those links were broken.

As it turned out, nothing could be easier. We can just stick a copy of that first version of the link checker in the same directory as make_page.cgi and modify its configuration variables to point it at the CyberFair site. We should also set it to output its results as HTML.

Then we add the following to the end of the &regenerate_site_links subroutine in make_page.cgi:

my $report = `$fs_root/maint/link_check.plx`;

if ($report =~ /<BODY>(.+)<\/BODY>/s) {
    $content .= $1;
}

&show_links;

That just runs the link checker using backticks (`), captures the output into $report, and then uses a regular expression to extract just the portion of the report between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags. That report is appended to the $content variable, so any broken links are reported to the user in the results page he sees after invoking &regenerate_site_links.

There are several things that the scripts described in these last four chapters ...

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