I've returned to this post at the close of my semester in college.

I've read through a book on CGI/Perl that was an introductory book, as well as through the first chapter and a bit of Programming Perl. Because I don't have too much reading under my belt, the code for this is a little sloppy.

I rewrote the script (even after Jeffa posted a good one) for two reasons: One, that I didn't understand Jeffa's script, and Two, that it's important that the script output as text/plain, so that it will be easy to cut and paste into the post window (otherwise the paragraph tags disappear). I made sure to take out the break tags, too!

It would have been nice, if the following line worked (which would have made my code a lot simpler):

split /\n{2,}/, $inputed_text;

However, that doesn't work, hence the messy code for determining what a paragraph is:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard -debug);

# Perlmonks.org Poster, by David Caughell, grasp_the_sun@yahoo.co.uk
# Converts simple text into text that can be cut and paste into PM pos
+ts

print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";

my $text = param('FPost');
my @sections = split('code'.'>', $text);

# get rid of leftovers from code tags
for (@sections) {
    chop if /\/$/;
    chop if /<$/;
}

for (0 .. $#sections) {
    unless ($_ % 2) {
        my @lines = split /\n/, $sections[$_];
        my @paragraphs = ('');

        for (@lines) {
            if (length $_ <= 1) {
                push(@paragraphs,'') 
                  if length($paragraphs[$#paragraphs]);
            }
            $paragraphs[$#paragraphs] .= $_ if length $_ > 1;
        }
        pop(@paragraphs) unless length $paragraphs[$#paragraphs];

        print "<P>\n$_\n</P>\n\n" for @paragraphs;
    }
    else {
        print '<code'.">\n$sections[$_]</code".">\n\n";
    }
}
[download]

Dave.

$scratchpad_public = 0 unless $scratchpad;