Perl Template Toolkit

Chapter 1. Getting Started with the Template Toolkit

The Template Toolkit is an all-Perl template processing system. Unlike many other Perl templating systems, it is as proficient at producing HTML as it is at producing XML, PDF, or any other output format. It has its own simple templating language, so templates can be written and edited by people who do not know Perl. And it supports command-line, modular, CGI, and mod_perl operation.

In this chapter, we compare the Template Toolkit to other templating systems such as HTML::Mason and HTML::Template, describe how to install it, then show you what templates look like and how to process them. The goal of this chapter is to get you started—you should be able to install the Template Toolkit, write and understand basic templates, and know how to process the templates from the command line, from Perl programs, and from mod_perl.

What the Template Toolkit Does

The basic task of a template processor is to output some amount of changeable data surrounded by some unchanging data. A simple example of this is a form letter, where the same text is sent to many different people, with just the name, address, and other personal details being changed. The template contains the fixed (“boilerplate”) text together with special markup tags indicating where the variable pieces of data are to be placed.

Example 1-1 shows a template for such a form letter. This template is marked up using the default style of the Template Toolkit, where the [% ... %] tags ...