Style Questions For Elegant Printing of Tables

jerrygarciuh has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Mes freres,
The subs bellow are from an Excel parsing script which displays the data in a variety of ways. One display set is a series of 8 tables which have similar columns but vary arbitrarily as to how many cells in a row have data. I am wondering if someone sees a more elegant solution. The code is already in production but I would like it to be as elegant and efficient as possible as it is on a slow IIs box. My initial thought is to try to unify the row_making subs into one that accepts as args the rows it will spit out. Like so make_rows(3,1,3); to make 3 rows with three, one, and three data cells per row, but maybe someone sees a fancy use for map or something more elegant?
TIA
jg

sub by_parish  {

    print $q->header,start_html( {-title=>"Kids Count Data for $choice
+$headline"}) ,
        div({-align=>"center"},
        $top, h2({-align=>"CENTER"},"Data for $choice$headline"), hr({
+-width=>"400"}),
        ), #div
        p( b($t[$k++]),br,  ##iterate thru @ of table names
        table( {-width=>'600',-border=>'1'},  ##Population (1997)
            @toprow,
            parishdata_x3(),parishdata_x3(),parishdata_x1(),  ##call t
+he subs to print either 3 data cells or 1
        ), #table
              ), #p  

          p(  b($t[$k++]),br,  
        table( {-width=>'600',-border=>'1'},  ##Poverty (1995)
            @toprow,
            parishdata_x1(),parishdata_x1(),
        ), #table
.... #and so on

sub parishdata_x3 {
    Tr({-align=>"right"},
    td( {-align=>"center"}, b($r[$j++]), ),  #iterate thru @ of row la
+bels
    td( {-bgcolor=>"$data"}, @{$info{$choice}}[$i++] ),  #iterate thru
+ alpha sorted hash from excel file
    td( {-bgcolor=>"$data"}, @{$info{$choice}}[$i++] ),
    td( {-bgcolor=>"$data"}, @{$info{$choice}}[$i++] ),
    );
}

sub parishdata_x1 {
    Tr({-align=>"right"},
    td( {-align=>"center"}, b($r[$j++]), ),
    td( {-bgcolor=>"$data"}, "&nbsp;"),
    td( {-bgcolor=>"$data"}, "&nbsp;"),
    td( {-bgcolor=>"$data"}, @{$info{$choice}}[$i++] ),
    );
}
[download]

_____________________________________________________
Think a race on a horse on a ball with a fish! TG

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•Re: Style Questions For Elegant Printing of Tables by merlyn (Sage) on Mar 22, 2002 at 23:40 UTC
Have you seen HTML::Table? Might just do what you need. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker	[reply]
(jeffa) Re: Style Questions For Elegant Printing of Tables by jeffa (Bishop) on Mar 22, 2002 at 22:23 UTC
I understand that you didn't want to dump the whole script on us, but without seeing how certain data structures are defined, i can't do too much with what you have provided. And what i could do might not be right anway without knowing what the input is, and especially not knowing what the target output is. But i wouldn't be posting if i couldn't tell you anything. ;) You need to pass arguments to your subroutines - iterating through global datastructures by using the post increment operator is bad, bad, bad. Using a simple for loop would be more appropriate, then maybe a map. As for your request for a subroutine to make a table that has differing numbers of columns, you will need pass the data itself as well as how many columns you want - how about passing an array ref of the data instead? Also, you might want to consider using the 'colspan' attribute to take care of those rows with a lower number of columns. Here is a snippet to get you started: `use strict; use CGI qw(:standard); use CGI::Pretty; print make_rows( [(1)], [(1..2)], [(1..3)], ); sub make_rows { my $str; for (@_) { $str .= Tr(( map { td($_) } @$_ )); } return $str; }` [download] UPDATE: there is more than one way to do it ;) `sub make_rows { @_ = map { Tr((map { td($_) } @$_)) } @_; return wantarray ? @_ : join('',@_); }` [download] jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply] [d/l] [select]