I built a search feature on my wife's website, and I decided in the search function at the beginning, which it does not matter where because of how I did it, I had to add a variable in a hash ($in{highlight_text} = $_query;) Where $_query = param("q"); (Set just above this variable).

The hash (%in) is created at the beginning of the 'system' by cgi-lib (ReadParse(\%in)) and so I am just 'adding' a variable to it.

Now all the 'page content' is in a variable, let's call it $_page_content_var so at the end, just before I print it to the page, I am doing this:
my $__highlight_to_switch = qq~<font class="highlight">$in{highlight_t
+ext}</font>~;
$_page_content_var =~ s/$in{highlight_text}/$__highlight_to_switch/eg;

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Now my problem is that since it's a 'search' function, I have a link with the query text in there something like this: <a href="http://www.mydomain.com/index.cgi?pg=search&q=$_query"> since $_query contains the text that I am searching for, it will inadvertantly 'switch' the q=$_query part of the text with the <font... text.

Is there a way to make this not do that? I don't want it to change stuff inside of html tags, just everything else on the page, so that it's highlighted for the end user to see the 'stuff' they searched for.


thx,
Richard

In reply to Switching out text only in a variable by powerhouse

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