no newlines in as_HTML?
Fred Douglis (douglis@research.att.com)
Mon, 15 Jul 1996 10:30:52 -0400
Something else that has changed from b5 to 5.0 (without any particular mention
in the ChangeLog from what I can tell) is the lack of newlines in generated
HTML. Seems like the library used to insert newlines in any constructs that
weren't configured not to insert them. Now it just builds a list of elements
and joins them with the null separator followed by one newline at the end.
Normally HTML is insensitive to the lack of newlines, but when parsing and
regenerating a large document, missing newlines can be annoying. In fact, I
used to use "GET -o html file:..." to pretty-print a file that had poor
structure and turn it into something that was nicely indented. I really miss
that -- is there a way to do that still?
Anyway, my temporary fix was to change the join construct in as_HTML to join
with newlines, but I'm not sure that's guaranteed to work. Gisle, any
thoughts? Speaking of changing as_HTML, let me ask an aside about O-O
techniques to handle this. I'm a relative neophyte at O-O programming and
certainly with respect to Perl5. I have successfully subclassed some of the
packages to give them different behavior that I want in a particular
application, but I'm wondering about cases like this where I'd expect to
replace a piece of as_HTML across the board. I don't want to modify every
script to use a new class in place of HTML. If I don't want to touch the
original library, is it sufficient to redefine it directly, as in:
require HTML::Element;
{
package HTML::Element;
sub as_HTML
{
# ... new version goes here
}
}
Thanks,
Fred Douglis MIME accepted douglis@research.att.com
AT&T Research 908 582-3633 (office)
600 Mountain Ave., Rm. 2B-105 908 582-3063 (fax)
Murray Hill, NJ 07974 http://www.research.att.com/orgs/ssr/people/douglis/