PHP has include(index.php); what does Perl have?

2010-06-21T00:13:44Z

I've done a little more with Perl and web design, but I've encountered a problem that has left me a bit perplexed. There's something PHP does that I'm sure Perl CAN do, but I'm just not sure how. That said, I'm not a huge fan of PHP, and to be quite honest the only function I've utilized has been include(), which is what I need to replicate. As you know, being able to standardize a page layout (header, body, footer) with separate pages makes things much easier to update. Instead of correcting/adding a navigation link to twenty pages, you only make one change! However, using PHP within a Perl script (without the aid of the PHP or PHP::Include modules - my host doesn't have 'em installed) doesn't work as the browser doesn't get the chance to parse/execute the PHP.

Some people have pointed me in the direction of the system() function, but I don't think that's quite what I need (please correct me if I'm wrong). Also, I don't really know how I'd use it - there's nothing to really 'execute' in the PHP I want; I guess all I really need is to read in a .php or .html file and store it to a scalar variable and then place the variable where I would normally use

In that case, I guessed that just opening the file and storing it to some array/list would allow me to simply print the array, but I can't figure out how to do it!

I resorted to Google, and came up with this page.

I've tried every method there, but I always end up with a blank page. Does anyone have insight on this?

For reference, I've been testing this with:

http://www.masterrex.com/test/include/test.pl
http://www.masterrex.com/test/include/i/head.html



print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

open (HTML, "
print ;

close (HTML);  

############

open (HTMLDOC, "
flock (HTMLDOC, 1);

my @htmlFile = ;

close (HTMLDOC);

print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";

foreach (@htmlFile) {

print $_;

}

Also, if I were to not use a bareword, what kind of variable would I end up using? I've read somewhere that opening a file to a scalar only works if there are no return characters in the file - so I'd assume that I'd want an array/list. I'm a bit confused at this point :P

Hello, World. /cliché

2010-05-31T18:19:50Z

I've only recently taken on the tremendous task of learning Perl (with the aide of O'Reilly's Learning Perl). I have a little background in programming as I am a Computer Engineering & Computer Science student at the Florida Institute of Technology. Actually, I was a student there. I can't quite afford it at this point, and I'm going to attempt to transfer elsewhere (UCF, USF, UF? Something with a U and an F, I'd suppose).

Well, on to something a bit more on-topic. I'm midway through Chapter 5 in Learning Perl and I felt the need to create something that the book didn't explicitly tell me to. I eventually want to build my own forums software, but this small 'Journal' or 'Diary' script will have to do for now.

#! /usr/bin/perl
print "Press CTRL-D to end journal entry.\n";
my $success = open LOG, ">>logfile";
if ( ! $success) {
die "Cannot create logfile: $!";
}

select LOG;
print "\n\n", scalar localtime(), "\n";
print ;

I'm sort of surprised that this blog software doesn't have a specific 'code' tag. Perhaps I'm missing something?

The script above isn't very complex, and if you're reading this blog I'm sure you've already noticed that what I've done in a few lines could have been done a single line. Unlike most programmers, I prefer to write things out the long way for readability's sake. I wonder if Larry Wall would hate me for it?

Edit - Thanks for the input! The script was simplified to four simple lines:

print "Press CTRL-D to end journal entry.\n";
open my $log, '>>', 'logfile' or die "Cannot open logfile: $!";
print {$log} "\n\n", scalar localtime(), "\n";
print {$log} ;

Also, there's an alternative to specifying {$log} each time:

select $log;
print "\n\n", scalar localtime(), "\n";
print ;