When you posted, the first thing you did was hit "preview". It showed you the "big mess", but also asked "If something looked unlike you expected it to you might need to check out Writeup Formatting Tips". Click on that. I refer you to the seventh entry there about using <code> and </code> tags. That is precisely what you need. The rest of that info would be useful to your long stay here.

Also during the preview, there was a bunch of stuff in smaller letters at the bottom - one thing that is bolded is "Snippets of code". It contains similar instructions regarding the code tags.

In reply to Re^3: TimePing by Tanktalus
in thread TimePing by amyarjun

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


  • 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! —
  • 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:
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    < &lt;
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    [ &#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.