Good afternoon fellow monks. Today's problem is with HTML::Template. I have a website which is driven primarily by HTML::Template, and on the front page of the website is a small row of recent articles. Each article's title/date/author are bordered in a small table, and the first few lines of the article are shown below it. Clicking on the title will bring you to a full page of the full article content. This part works.

My problem though, is that I'd like to only show the top 'n' most-recent articles, not all of them. I have the articles in a file, templates/articles.tmpl, which contains the an article header (example below). In the header is a link to the full article, which is in it's own template as well.

Article Header example: 

<br />
<TMPL_VAR NAME=ARTICLE_HDR_FRAME>
<tr>
   <td><TMPL_VAR NAME=ARTICLE_HDR_BODY>
      <tr>
         <td align="left">
            <img src="<TMPL_VAR NAME=IMAGES>/new_package.gif" alt="09-
+22-2001" width="12" height="12" border="0" />&nbsp;
            <a href="<TMPL_VAR NAME=SCRIPT>/article015"><TMPL_VAR NAME
+=FONTFACE><font color="blue"><b>My Article Title</b></font></a>
         </td>
         <td align="right"><i>Saturday, September 22nd, 2001</i></td>
      </tr>
   </table>
   </td>
</tr>
</table>

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" bgcolor="#ffffff" wi
+dth="100%">
   <tr>
      <td><TMPL_VAR NAME=FONTFACE>A small blurb of the article, a 'tea
+ser', which is the first few sentences of the full article.</font></t
+d>
   </tr>
</table>

[download]
(some of the HTML tags may look disjointed, but they do match, since this is encapsulated in a larger piece of HTML)

My code for loading articles.tmpl looks like this: 

sub front_page_articles {
my $fp_article_template = HTML::Template->new(filename => 'templates/a
+rticles.tmpl');

$fp_article_template->param(
   ARTICLE_HDR_FRAME => $article_hdr_frame,
   ARTICLE_HDR_BODY  => $article_hdr_body,
   IMAGES            => $images,
   FONTFACE          => "$fontface",
   SCRIPT            => $script,
   SITE              => $site,
);
print $fp_article_template->output;   
}

[download]
I can't seem to figure out a way, without reading in the file with 'open(ART, "templates/articles.tmpl") or dir "Foo!" {...}' and then splitting at the 'nth' blank line between article constructs, to limit the front page to display the top 5 most recent articles, for example. When the user clicks on the 'All Articles' link, the full article list will be shown, from 0..n.

How can I do this? Am I using the wrong tool?

Edit ar0n -- fixed title

In reply to HTML::Template 'splicing' help by hacker

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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