in reply to < Woes

First, I have to ask why (maybe there's a reason e.g. legacy, install/enviroment issues, etc) you're going with this home grown solution and not Template::Toolkit or Mason which both support include files and embedded perl.

As for the < causing problems, that's curious.. First thought of a work-around is to use a here-doc instead of qq[].

For the explaination I think that this perldoc perlop snippet holds the answer (hopefully someone more knowledgeable of qq[] can elaborate):

   Finding the end
   The first pass is finding the end of the quoted construct, whether it be a multicharacter delimiter
    ""\nEOF\n"" in the "<<EOF" construct, a "/" that terminates a "qq//" construct, a "]" which terminates
    "qq[]" construct, or a ">" which terminates a fileglob started with "<".


Update: I'm having troubling reproducing the error -- do you have a simple test case (e.g. one that reads from <DATA>)? The following script works for me: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
my $text;
my %h_self = (form_data =>{page=>'confirmation'});

while(<DATA>){
if (m/\<!-- Begin Perl Block --\>/i)
    {
    my $perlcode = '';
    # Pull in all the perl code
    while (<DATA>)
        {
        # This is the end of the block
        last if m/\<!-- End Perl Block --\>/i;
        $perlcode .= $_;
        }
    # Execute the anonymous sub
    warn &{eval $perlcode;};
    }
}

__DATA__

BLAH

<!-- Begin Perl Block -->
sub
    {
    $text = '';
    if ($h_self{form_data}{page} =~ /confirmation|application/i)
        {
$text .= qq[<style type="text/css">
body {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
table {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
tr {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
td {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
select {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
input {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
form {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
div {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}
p {font-size: 8pt;font-family: Arial, Helvetica;}

.red {font-weight: bold;font-size: 10pt;color: red;text-align:right;}
.black {font-weight: bold;font-size: 10pt;color: black;text-align:righ
+t;}
.backfill {background-color:003399;text-align:center;color:white;font-
+weight:bold;border: 1px solid white;}
.cell {border: 1px solid white;}
.edit {width: 50;}
</style>];
        }

    return $text;
    }
<!-- End Perl Block -->

STUFF

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RE:RE: < Woes
by rongoral (Beadle) on Jul 03, 2005 at 21:47 UTC

    Your bit of code works exactly as I would like mine to. =( I've put it into an executable and it does what I expect. However, if I gut the function in the original cgi script and put your code in, it fails. In fact, nothing is printed after the eval statement.

    I have found, however, that if I substitute &lt; for < in the file and then s/\&lt;/\</g; after it is pulled out, the text will then take the form that I want. Now, though as I stated above, I find that the real failure is in the eval portion. But, I cannot pull out the reason using $@. I think that it fails, but it will not say why.

    I am not using Template::Toolkit or the like because I don't know what is going to be on a particular server. I am usually writing code for people who are paying to be hosted on someone's server and I cannot always be sure what is and is not installed there. Likewise, I don't have access to SSH their sites. So, I try to keep it as "pure" as possible. Of course, as anyone will correctly point out, this means that I have to wade through my own errors before the code becomes fit for consumption.

    I must be doing something incredibly stupid. But, I can't see it.

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