in reply to Table in Perl CGI

As a general thing mixing HTML and code is a Bad Thing™ because it makes it harder to maintain both the code and the HTML. Better is to use modules such as HTML::Template which lets you write most of the page as an ordinary HTML file and add a little magic to allow parts of the HTML to be provided by the script. Consider:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Template;

my $htmlStr = <<HTML;
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    
    <body>
    <table border=1>
    <TMPL_LOOP name=fruits>  <tr>
        <td><TMPL_VAR name=fruit /></td>
        <td><TMPL_VAR name=color /></td>
      </tr>
    </TMPL_LOOP></table>
    </body>
</html>
HTML

my %tbl = (
    orange      => 'orange',
    lime        => 'lime',
    lemon       => 'lemon',
    bannannanna => 'yellow'
);
my @fruits = map {{fruit => $_, color => $tbl{$_}}} keys %tbl;
my $template = HTML::Template->new(scalarref => \$htmlStr);

$template->param(fruits => \@fruits);
print $template->output();

[download]

Prints:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html>
    <head>
    </head>
    
    <body>
    <table border=1>
      <tr>
        <td>lime</td>
        <td>lime</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>orange</td>
        <td>orange</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>lemon</td>
        <td>lemon</td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td>bannannanna</td>
        <td>yellow</td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    </body>
</html>

[download]

Usually an external file would be used instead of the here doc and string in the sample.

Update: output fixed - thanks CountZero

Premature optimization is the root of all job security

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom