First a bit of background. I started doing HTML for about 4 years before I ever touched perl, and I consider myself quite good at it. When I started creating Perl scripts I quickly started seeing a problem with generating html. Bad enough that you start doing here-documents, but then people suggest that you start generating html with CGI. As a writer of html, I consider CGI html to be a total abomination - it's not html, and it's pretty ugly when you start doing anything more than the basics. Then one day I found html::template - the perfect way to abstract html and Perl. Then today I realized that I could in fact include html and perl in the same document AND keep them separate at the same time. Just attach html::template to a data block:
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#!/usr/local/bin/perl/ -wT
use strict;
use HTML::Template

my $template = HTML::Template->new( 'filehandle' => *DATA );

#-- blah blah --#

__DATA__

html template stuff

[download]
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I've tried it and it works, but my question is, is this a good idea? I was wondering if anyone had any comments on how this would affect performance or if there are any other considerations. Currently I can find a lot of stand alone scripts that would benefit from this, especially since I often write scripts for a friend and he sometimes sets the script to chmod 660 and the template to 755. Generally there is no voodo going on at my server (no mod_perl and such), just strait CGI(::Simple).

In reply to html template in a perl script by archen

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