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

Hello Monks,

I'm a bit confused why this isn't working the way it should. I'm probably just tired and making a careless mistake, but I just don't see it. Suppose the following: 
# the following message will be sent to the specified recipient in ord
+er
# to promote the site.  the following markers may be used anywhere in
# the message
#
# <RECP_NAME> - will be replaced with the recipient's name
# <SEND_NAME> - will be replaced with the sender's name
# <SITE_URL> - will be replaced with the site url variable from above
#
my $message2 = '

Hey <RECP_NAME>,

I was surfing the web and I stopped by a pretty cool site that I think
+ you
might be interested in.  It is filled with cool information, good link
+s, funny
pics, and more, so be sure to check it out!

Here is the address of the site: <SITE_URL>.

<SEND_NAME>
<SEND_EMAIL>

';

[download]
Now if I had the following lines of code, shouldn't the appropriate replacements be made? 
$message1 =~ s/<RECP_NAME>/$$formdata{'recp_name'}/ig;
$message1 =~ s/<SEND_NAME>/$$formdata{'send_name'}/ig;
$message1 =~ s/<SITE_URL>/$site_url/ig;

[download]
Everything gets replaced by the <SITE_URL>; that gets left for some reason. I do something similar to another string and half of the cases get replaced, while half of them don't. Does anyone see what I'm doing wrong?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
•Re: string substitution help
by merlyn (Sage) on Sep 23, 2002 at 02:54 UTC
    Instead of inventing Yet Another Templating Solution, you might also consider Template Toolkit. Here's something I whipped up in 5 minutes from your source. Note the alternative provided for sender email: 
    #!/usr/bin/perl -w 
use strict; 
$|++; 
 
use Template; 
 
my $result = Template->new 
  ( 
   START_TAG => '<', END_TAG => '>', 
  )->process(\*DATA, 
             { 
              recp_name => 'Recipient name', 
              send_name => 'Sender name', 
              ## send_email => 'sender@example.com', 
              site_url => 'http://example.com/some/place', 
             }) || die Template->error; 
 
__END__ 
Hey <recp_name>, 
 
I was surfing the web and I stopped by a pretty cool site that I think
+ you 
might be interested in.  It is filled with cool information, good link
+s, funny 
pics, and more, so be sure to check it out! 
 
Here is the address of the site: <site_url>. 
 
<send_name> 
<IF send_email; send_email; ELSE; "[no email specified]"; END>

    [download]

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[reply]
[d/l]
      Hey Merlyn

      Thanks for the reply; I figured out what my problem was.

      If there's one thing I've learned from frequenting PM.org, it's to always use strict and -w. The snippet of code I posted was just that...a snippet. The rest of the code does contain use strict and -w.

      Either way, I found my careless error. Thanks for the post.
[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
•Re: string substitution help
by merlyn (Sage) on Sep 23, 2002 at 02:43 UTC
[reply]

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