Re: mini-languages for MVC view/controller manipulation

HTML::Template . . . A popular, robust, powerful mini-language templating system which also does just fine on normal text files.

IMHO, it's not suitable for normal text files because of the way it handles whitespace:

$ perl -MHTML::Template -e '$in = join "", <>; $tmpl = HTML::Template-
+>new( scalarref => \$in ); print $tmpl->output;'
Hi

<TMPL_IF foo>
<TMPL_INCLUDE foo.txt>
</TMPL_IF>

Hello
[download]

Which will output:

Hi



Hello
[download]

The extra lines just aren't acceptable for plaintext. It's fine for HTML since whitespace is almost always ignored there.

"There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.

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Re^2: mini-languages for MVC view/controller manipulation by simonm (Vicar) on Dec 28, 2004 at 07:44 UTC
This doesn't seem like much of a problem; either leave the extra whitespace out of your source files, or mark the extra lines in some way and remove them before processing. Version one looks like this: `Hi <TMPL_IF foo><TMPL_INCLUDE foo.txt> </TMPL_IF>Hello` [download] Version two looks like this: `Hi \ <TMPL_IF foo>\ <TMPL_INCLUDE foo.txt> </TMPL_IF>\ \ Hello` [download] `... $in =~ s/\\\n[\t ]*//g; ...` [download] Doesn't this same issue apply to most templating packages, or am I missing something about why this is more of an issue for HTML::Template than the others?	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: mini-languages for MVC view/controller manipulation by hardburn (Abbot) on Dec 28, 2004 at 14:13 UTC
Doesn't this same issue apply to most templating packages . . . ? Probably. If there is anything special about H::T, it's that its default tag syntax is a bit lengthy. Compare to Text::BasicTemplate: `Hi %if foo%include%fi% Hello` [download] (Note that Text::BasicTemplate doesn't have an equivilent to `TMPL_INCLUDE` by default, though it can call out to Perl subroutines.) That's a much more condensed example that, IMHO, works better for plaintext. "There is no shame in being self-taught, only in not trying to learn in the first place." -- Atrus, Myst: The Book of D'ni.	[reply] [d/l] [select]