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

greets monks,

i am trying to use an array of filenames, and insert the contents of each pseudo-html file between an html header and footer to make a new static html page.

i was originally hopings i could use something like: 
print OUTFILE `cat $arraymember`;

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but to no avail, so far... then i decided to use the normal file handle approach, by opening the file, iterating through each line in the current file and inserting each line into my new file using a seperate filehandle, and closing each current file each time it loops. the subroutine looks like this: 
sub catfile {
   foreach (@dirarray) {
      $filepage = shift(@dirarray);
      #print TOCOUT "$filepage\n"; #debug!
      unless ($filepage eq '') {
      open (TEMPFILE, $filepage) or die "cannot open $filepage: $!\n";
      #print TOCOUT `cat $filepage`; #i wish!
      while ($newline = <TEMPFILE>) {
      print TOCOUT "$newline";
      #print "$newline"; #debug!
         }
      close (TEMPFILE);
      }
      
   }
} # end catfile

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what i'm getting is each file for output is being written the entire contents of *every* file in the array, instead of just the contents of one file. i think this is because the array i am iterating over doesn't shift like i want it to, but... there is a debug line where i try to print out the filename after each iteration of the array - this works perfectly as expected - one filename per iteration. please excuse the incredibly messy code - it's in the stages of exasperation. question, why is it opening multiple pages? is there an easier way to do this?

thanks extra muchly in advance....

edited: Wed Oct 16 16:06:01 2002 by jeffa - code tags s/<br>//g

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Re: special context of file names in array?
by sauoq (Abbot) on Oct 16, 2002 at 02:17 UTC

    It is difficult to decipher exactly what you are trying to do from your description and code. If I understand, then the code below should work. It is most definitely not how I would normally write such a routine but I didn't want to put too much time in as I wasn't even sure it would do what you wanted. So, I used backticks with cat (as you did), slurped in all of the files, and used a minimal amount of error checking.

    It'll take the file names given on the command line and create new files with "new_" prepended to the original names that contain the contents of the file sandwiched between the contents of the files header.txt and footer.txt.

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w 
use strict;

sub add_header_and_footer_to_files { 
    my @files = @_; 
    my $header = `cat header.txt`;
    my $footer = `cat footer.txt`;
    for my $filename (@files) { 
        my $file = `cat $filename`; 
        open OUT, '>', "new_$filename" 
            or die "Couldn't open $filename.new for writing: $!\n"; 
        print OUT $header, $file, $footer; 
    } 
}

add_header_and_footer_to_files(@ARGV);

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    Good luck!

    -sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
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Re: special context of file names in array?
by Enlil (Parson) on Oct 16, 2002 at 01:57 UTC
    I know this is the same thing most people put initially, but have you tried: 
    use strict;
use warnings;

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    Also have you opened the file TOCOUT for writing, anywhere?

    also: I think the code

    foreach my $filepage (@dirarray) {...};

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    or 
    foreach (@dirarray) { 
my $filepage = $_;
..
}

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    instead of the $filepage=shift(@dirarray);

    I hope this helps you along.

    -Enlil

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