Hello,

I'm working on a small API for a project that I'm involved in at the moment. One of the things I want to be able to do is allow somebody to send me some template text along with placeholders for special information that my object knows about, and then return the text with the required information substituted in. Very similar to the way apache allows you to specify custom log formats.

It seems to me that using placeholders the way that printf does ( % then some identifier, perhaps with some formatting options) seems to be a standard way of doing this.

My main question: is there any module out there that specializes in parsing these kinds of template strings, or do I pretty much have to start from the ground up?

If I do have to start from the ground up, then I'm thinking that initially, I'm going to try something simple like this:

  my $template_text =~ s/\%g/$g_var/g;
[download]

There are a ton of problems with this:

• It really isn't scalable, if I end up with 50 possible things to substitute, I have to have 50 reg exp's.
• It doesn't deal with escaping characters. My regular expression experience is really limited in this area. How can I make '%g' substitute to $g_var and '\\%g' substitute to '\' . $g_var and make '\%g' substitute to '%g' with a replacement expression?
• My gut instinct just tells me this is wrong.

I really appreciate any assistance with this, especially if somebody can tell me that this has already been written! :)

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.