Template newbie question. Is it lack of understanding or lack of DWIM

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

I have the following code in a template:

[% section ? ucfirst(section) _ ' - ' : '' %]
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And what I mean is:

print ucfirst(section).' - 'if section;
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But what I get is:

 -
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So my question is, what should I write to mean that, or what does Template think I mean by that. Either answer would be greatly helpful, as what I gleaned from the documentation has me under the impression that my statement is completely legal and should work.

Comment on Template newbie question. Is it lack of understanding or lack of DWIM Select or Download Code

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Re: Template newbie question. Is it lack of understanding or lack of DWIM by friedo (Prior) on Apr 16, 2007 at 18:51 UTC
Template Toolkit doesn't support `ucfirst` as a method, but it does have a `ucfirst` filter. I don't think it supports the ternary operator, either. You could write it like this: `[% IF section %][% section \| ucfirst %] - [% END %]` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Template newbie question. Is it lack of understanding or lack of DWIM by Trizor (Pilgrim) on Apr 16, 2007 at 18:56 UTC
It does support the ternary operator, when I run that with section undef it produces nothing. Well I suppose I should finish reading aforementioned documentation instead of stopping after GET and SET. The filter solution feels somewhat less elegant though.	[reply]
Re^2: Template newbie question. Is it lack of understanding or lack of DWIM by Rhandom (Curate) on Apr 16, 2007 at 20:47 UTC
You can make it a little less visually dense by changing it to something like the following (works in TT2 and CET): `[% IF section ; section\|ucfirst ; ' - ' ; END %]` [download] my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Template newbie question. Is it lack of understanding or lack of DWIM by Rhandom (Curate) on Apr 16, 2007 at 20:43 UTC
TT3 will allow you to use a "\|" wherever you use a "." now. It will also unify simple filters so that they will also work with the ".". It is possible in TT3 when it comes, or it is possible in CGI::Ex::Template now. `use CGI::Ex::Template; my $t = CGI::Ex::Template->new; my $html = "Test: [% section\|ucfirst _ '-' IF section %]\n"; $t->process(\$html, {section => "foo"}); $t->process(\$html, {section => ""}); __END__ prints: Test: Foo- Test:` [download] In most cases CGI::Ex::Template is a drop in replacement for Template. my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];	[reply] [d/l]