Hi Monks,

I’m writing a web application in Perl. It has a form containing contact information, the code for which is currently laid out something like this: 

$form_htm = <<EOF
<input value="$in{firstname}" name="firstname">
<input value="$in{surname}" name="surname">
...etc...
EOF

[download]
Later on I print $form_htm (amongst other things) to display the webpage.

The above is working for me, and the fields are interpolated as expected.
However, I’d like different organisations who use this application to be able to have a different layout for their fields.  Some fields won’t apply to some organisations, and some organisations will want different sizes (on the webpage) for fields than others.
So, I thought I’d store the HTML for the form in a database (different versions in different records for different organizations).
But because the HTML is not stored in the script, the fields (like $in{firstname}) are not interpolated, so the variable names themselves are ending up on the webpage, (which is not quite the look I’m after).

Any recommendations on how I should get these variables to be evaluated in this context? (First thing that came to mind is eval(), but that seems aimed at evaluating expressions, not variables mixed in with a lot of other text.)
Or can you suggest a better approach which would allow different organisations to have different form layouts?

Edit: I have also posted this question on StackOverflow, but would like to get other opinions.

Thanks.
tel2

In reply to Interpolation of variables in stored HTML by tel2

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