HERE documents are good advice even if you do use CGI.pm, for those situations where the nested function structure that CGI.pm imposes proves to be too unwieldly (for example, constructing a table where you might need a foreach loop to enumerate the elements). Yes, it can always be done with CGI.pm, but sometimes it is easier to look at and manipulate with a simple HERE document.

If you want your HERE documents to be indented you assign the document to a scalar, and then perform a substitution on leading whitespace for each line.

The Perl Cookbook provides a couple of good solutions. Here's an adaptation of one version.

($html = <<HERE_DOC) =~ s/^[^\S\n]//gm;
    your text
    goes here.
        Notice how indentation
        doesn't matter because
        the regexp bound to the
    HERE doc strips leading
    whitespace.
HERE_DOC
print $html;
[download]

This works by substituting any amount of whitespace (space, tab, form feed) at the beginning of the line with "nothing" unless the "whitespace" is a newline character (ie, it preserves newlines). Cool huh?

Enjoy!

Dave

"If I had my life to do over again, I'd be a plumber." -- Albert Einstein