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

I have a site I built and have come near the end of its construction but there's something I can't figure out how to do. Basically I need the main script to open my page's html frontend and search for a string then append a link to another page, so all the links can be organized neatly/alphabetically on the page. So far I've setup a number comments/reference points on my html page for the script to look for

<!a>
<!b>
<!c>
<!d>

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and so on. Also in my script I have 

my $alphcity = substr($city, 0, 1);

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To get the first letter of the input string which could easily be plugged into  "<!$alphacity>". I just need to know how to tell the script to look for that and append to the following line in the html file. Any help would be awesome.

Thanks
B

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: search for string append in file
by oko1 (Deacon) on Dec 25, 2010 at 05:15 UTC

    Rather than reinventing the wheel (and guaranteeing that you'll eventually run into a problem), why not just use a template? That's what they were created for. E.g.: 

    #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use HTML::Template;
$|++;

my @cities = (
    {   LABEL   =>  "A", CITY   => "Milwaukee" },
    {   LABEL   =>  "B", CITY   => "Milpitas"  },
    {   LABEL   =>  "C", CITY   => "Millston"  },
    {   LABEL   =>  "D", CITY   => "Milbrook"  },
    {   LABEL   =>  "E", CITY   => "Millboro"  }
);

my $t = HTML::Template->new(filehandle => *DATA);
$t->param(CITIES => \@cities);
print $t->output;

__END__
Content-Type: text/html

<html>
<head><title>Cities</title></head>
<body>

<TMPL_LOOP NAME="CITIES">
<p>
   Label: <TMPL_VAR NAME="LABEL"><br>
   City: <TMPL_VAR NAME="CITY">
</p>
</TMPL_LOOP>

</body>
</html>

    [download]

    Output:

    Content-Type: text/html

<html>
<head><title>Cities</title></head>
<body>


<p>
   Label: A<br>
   City: Milwaukee
</p>

<p>
   Label: B<br>
   City: Milpitas
</p>

<p>
   Label: C<br>
   City: Millston
</p>

<p>
   Label: D<br>
   City: Milbrook
</p>

<p>
   Label: E<br>
   City: Millboro
</p>


</body>
</html>

    [download]

    --
    "Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."
    -- B. L. Whorf
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[select]

      Appreciate the help everyone, got me looking in the right direction. The code that worked for me is this.

       open (IN, "+<site.html");

my @file = <IN>;
seek IN,0,0;
foreach $file (@file){
$file =~ s/$find/$dir/g;
print IN $file;
}

close IN;

      [download]

      Thanks again everyone

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Re: search for string append in file
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 25, 2010 at 01:40 UTC
    Um, thats kind of confusing, couldn't you just repeat what you're already doing?
[reply]

      Sorry trying to be as concise as possible without revealing the function of the code and such, what with nondisclosure agreements and such. Basically I just need the script to search a file for a word and append text to the following line in said file.

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