-Blake

Hello Blake, Thank you for the info. I looked at the information behind the "Tie" link and found a wealth of stuff to persue. I appreciate your input. Best Regards, Donnie

Hi Donnie,

you need a template system :) Something like HTML::Template or Text::Template. This my solution for your problem, a bit overkill and maybe unorthodox. Suppose you have a file named script.in with the following content:

#!/usr/bin/perl

my $hold='<TMPL_VAR HOLD>';
my $leave = '<TMPL_VAR LEAVE>';
my $munge = '<TMPL_VAR MUNGE>';
[download]

The program that will substitute HOLD, LEAVE and MUNGE is something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Template;

use vars qw( $in %args $template );

$in = shift @ARGV;
%args = @ARGV;

$template = HTML::Template->new( filename => $in );
$template->param(%args);
print $template->output;
[download]

Now you can use it this way:

which prints the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl

$hold = "this";
$leave = "that";
$munge = "these";
[download]

Ciao, Valerio

Update: you are welcome Donnie :)

Dear Valerio, WOW! Thanks so much for the code example! I will be with this most of today! It is awesome people take so much time here to help one another. May the sun always shine upon you! Best Regards and many thanks!

* Way the first: read in your target file one line at a time, write it back out to a temporary file but add your new content when necessary:

use strict;
my $newcontent="My camel has been bitten by a rather large flea. Pleas
+e call a vet.";
my $input="camel.cgi";
my $tempfile="/tmp/camel.$$";
open TARGET, "<$input" or die "Blerch: $!\n";
open TEMP, ">/$tempfile" or die "Hcerlb: $!\n";

while (<INPUT>) {

  # check for your cue: could be a running counter to
  # keep track of lines read, could be a regexp, could
  # be just about anything else. Let's assume the check
  # sets $ship_ahoy when you need to add lines.
  
  if $ship_ahoy {print TEMP $newcontent}
  print TEMP;
  }
close INPUT;
close TMP;
rename $tempfile $input or die "Hrlecb:$!\n";
print "Beware, this is untested code, and could definitely do with mor
+e robust error checking!\n";
[download]

CU
Robartes-

Dear Robartes, I want to personally thank you for your great and finely detailed reply to my question. This is just great! Yesterday I was blindly flailing around and this moring I have all this help! I will spend my day looking at all the information you and others provided and hopefully get this thing to work. You are most kind to provide the example and I am very grateful. With very best regards, Donnie

thor

Dear Thor, Thank you for your response. To answer your question: I have a script that can make certain modifications to a webpage, but the file name has to be "hard coded" into the script before it is run. What I am trying to do is make the script run on any webpage of the users choice, by using another script to select the choice to be made by the user, then plugging it into the main script before it is run. (Am I making sense here?) The user selects the page to be modified in the first script (Got that working just fine) and then plugs the resulting filename to the actual modifying script before it is run as: $filename = "webpagex.html". Thanks for your help. I have some things now to work with and will plod along to see where they lead. With best regards, Donnie

Though it may require a shifting of gears mentally, I would suggest reading this in from an input box on the webpage, and then have your script called with that as a passed in parameter. Modifiying the code on the fly is dangerous, and creates a possible race condition if two users go for it at the same time. With a passed in parameter, each user gets their own "copy" of the program to do whatever they want to do with.

thor