Dynamically creating CSS elements

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

In one of my subs, I need to create a new CSS element, such as:

.p {text-align: left;}
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The problem is with the element name (the '.p' in the example). Because I have many predefined CSS elements, I need to make sure that my element name is original and not already in use. The sub contains the predefined CSS in a heredoc.

Also the new element name correlates with a value passed into the sub. So if someone says:

some_sub(foo, bar);
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Then in some_sub, I need to create distinct CSS elements that somehow correlate to 'foo' and 'bar' respectively. (But I can't name them '.foo' and '.bar')

How best to do this?

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Re: Dynamically creating CSS elements by GrandFather (Saint) on Oct 18, 2005 at 22:45 UTC
One thing you could do is generate a hash of the names in use keyed by name and with a usage count as the value. Then form the next css name as `".$name" . $names{$name} + 1`. Remembering of course to `++$names{$name}` afterwards. Perl is Huffman encoded by design.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Dynamically creating CSS elements by Cody Pendant (Prior) on Oct 19, 2005 at 03:58 UTC
I can't help but think that there's something wrong with the way you're doing CSS altogether -- want to explain some more? -- but surely the simplest way would be to start with a $current_class_name of "a" and increment it every time you need a new one. You can't run out of class names because when you get to "z" you increment to "aa" and so on. ($_='kkvvttuu bbooppuuiiffss qqffssmm iibbddllffss') =~y~b-v~a-z~s; print	[reply]