It looks like you forgot to seek back to the beginning of the file before you read into @index. As is, @index only holds the lines after <!-- ENDMAIN -->, so when you think you're printing the start of the file you're actually printing the end.

This isn't the best way to write the program, though. Instead of reading in the entire template, then printing out the pieces, it's simpler to loop for each section, and exit a loop when the next section starts: 

#!E:/perl/bin/perl
use CGI qw(:all);
use strict;
print header;

open (TEMPLATE, "index.shtml") || die "cannot find index.shtml: $!";
while (<TEMPLATE>) {
 print;
 last if /^\s*<!-- MAIN -->.*$/;
}

while (<TEMPLATE>) {
  print, last if /^\s*<!-- ENDMAIN -->.*$/;
}

open (FORMTEMPLATE, 'form.txt') || die "cannot find form.txt: $!";
while (<FORMTEMPLATE>) {
  print;
}

while (<TEMPLATE>) {
  print;
}

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In reply to Re: Mixed-up output by chipmunk
in thread Mixed-up output by Nimster

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