My £/50 is to second the monk who said HTML::Template. In fact I don't think it's terribly difficult to learn, certainly not to get it to do what you want. You'd make a template file, say you call it results.tmpl which wd look something like: 
<table bgcolor=#66aaff border=2 bordercolor=#ffffff cellspacing=0 cell
+padding=6>
    <TMPL_LOOP RESULTS>
        <tr>
            <td>
                <TMPL_VAR CHK>
            </td>
            <td>
                <TMPL_VAR NAME>
            </td>
            <td>
                <TMPL_VAR COST>
            </td>
            <td>
                <TMPL_VAR NUMBER>
            </td>
            <td>
                <TMPL_VAR TXT>
            </td>
        </tr>
    </TMPL_LOOP>
</table>

[download]
(I like writing my TMPLs in upper case and my HTML in lower case to tell them apart visually - no other reason).

Then in your perl you need a bit that looks like this 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use CGI qw(:standard);
use HTML::Template;

# my guess about what your data structure might be:
my %information = (
    txt_foo => ['chk_foo','name_foo','cost_foo','number_foo'],
    txt_bar => ['chk_bar','name_bar','cost_bar','number_bar'],
    txt_baz => ['chk_baz','name_baz','cost_baz','number_baz'],
);

# initialise the template and other vars:
my $results_tmpl = HTML::Template->new(filename => 'results.tmpl');
my @results;

# populate @results with the data from %information:
for (keys %information) {
    my %row_data;
    $row_data{'txt'} = $_;
    $row_data{'chk'} = $information{$_}[0];
    $row_data{'name'} = $information{$_}[1];
    $row_data{'cost'} = $information{$_}[2];
    $row_data{'number'} = $information{$_}[3];
    push @results, \%row_data;
}

# drop the info into the template:
$results_tmpl->param(results => \@results);

# print the page:
print
    header,
    start_html,
    $results_tmpl->output(),
    end_html;

[download]
Simple, really. The marginally tricky bit is getting the data into the right form to go into the template. The single line $results_tmpl->param(results => \@results); is doing duty for a lot of lines like 
$results_tmpl->param(
    results => (
        txt => 'txt_foo',
        chk => 'chk_foo',
        ......

[download]
But obviously if you had to write it all out by hand, you might as well not be using the template at all. What I'm saying is that the code for populating the template will work, but it may take a bit of effort to get your head around it (it did mine). But you said you wanted to get it on your hands...

The only other problem I can foresee is that for some reason HTML::Template doesn't seem to be part of the standard issue. If you're using an ISP that doesn't offer it, you may want to refer to these threads.

update :Reflectingthat this is a problem I quite often come up against, and for which I wd like a simple solution, I had a sudden rush of blood to the head and wrote a module that makes it easier to do printing out lists of info in CGI, so now there's yet One More Way To Do It. Now you can do this, which I think you'll agree has a certain classical simplicity: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
module library
use CGI qw(:standard);
use CGI::tab;

my %information = (
    txt_foo => ['chk_foo','name_foo','cost_foo','number_foo'],
    txt_bar => ['chk_bar','name_bar','cost_bar','number_bar'],
    txt_baz => ['chk_baz','name_baz','cost_baz','number_baz'],
);

print
    header,
    start_html,
    start_tabs(75,150,225,300);

for my $key (keys %information) {
    print $key,t;
    print $_,t for @{ $information{$key} };
}

print 
    end_tabs,
    end_html;

[download]


§ George Sherston

In reply to Re: Re: Yet Another Stupid CGI Question by George_Sherston
in thread Yet Another Stupid CGI Question by chaoticset

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