Every once in a while I come across the problem where I want a perl script that spits out some HTML that is simple enough for a client/friend to maintain. It would be ideal to treat the HTML like a form or solid blah of data:

my $html =<<HTML;
&lt;html&gt;This is $crap that the $client told me to $spit out.&lt;/h
+tml&gt;
HTML
[download]

Of course, inevitably, what happens is that the variable that are embedded inside of the quoted string has a good chance of changing due to user input, location in program, etc. It starts becoming a pain in the ass for your HTML literate, but not perl literate friend of yours to maintain a dynamic form when it starts looking like:

$html1 = <<DATA;
blah blah $blah
DATA
$var = 'she is '.($some_cond) ? "so ugly" : "so phat";
$html2 = qq|This is your Mamma: $var|;
$final = $html1.$html2.$html3;
[download]

etc. etc. Which comes to something I wish perl would have- some form of simple late binding of functions to scalars in instances like this when you don't want to break up your pretty HTML formatting with perl code: Ideally, you want your CGI scripts to look as much like a vbscript/jsp application as possible: HTML with embedded code, and not a perl script with HTML embedded inside of it. For the purposes of doing this, I'm playing with a very simple wrapper class for tying scalars to functions with- it's not as straightfoward as I would like to bind functions to scalars, but it works...

package HackedBind;
 
sub TIESCALAR {
  my ($class, $func_ref) = @_;
  $class = $func_ref;
  return bless \$class;
}
 
sub FETCH {
  my $self = shift;
  return &{$$self};
}
1;
[download]

With this quick bit of clueless code, we can now write some cleaner scripts:

use CGI;
use POSIX;
$cgi = new CGI;

require HackedBind;
tie $clients, 'HackedBind', \&clients;
tie $coders, 'HackedBind', \&coders;
tie $timestamp, 'HackedBind', 
      \&{return strftime('MM-DD-YY',localtime(time));};

sub clients { return ((scalar @$cgi->param('clients') > 1) ? 
                 join(",", $cgi->param('clients')) : $cgi->param('clie
+nts')); }
sub coders { return  (scalar @$cgi->param('clients'))*2; }

#now tell your client to ignore everything above and edit
#below for changes:
$data = <<DATA;
The Time is $timestamp.

Our clients are $clients.

We have assigned $coders coders to the project.
DATA
[download]

Is there a better way to do this? Is there a better way to do late variable binding? Am I missing anything obvious? Again, keep in mind that it's rather late, and I am heavily intoxicated... --homee

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