Text::Template v1.23 This is a library for generating form letters, building HTML pages, or filling in templates generally. A `template' is a piece of text that has little Perl programs embedded in it here and there. When you `fill in' a template, you evaluate the little programs and replace them with their values. Here's an example of a template: Dear {$title} {$lastname}, It has come to our attention that you are delinquent in your {$monthname[$last_paid_month]} payment. Please remit ${sprintf("%.2f", $amount)} immediately, or your patellae may be needlessly endangered. Love, Mark "{nickname(rand 20)}" Dominus The result of filling in this template is a string, which might look something like this: Dear Mr. Gates, It has come to our attention that you are delinquent in your February payment. Please remit $392.12 immediately, or your patellae may be needlessly endangered. Love, Mark "Vizopteryx" Dominus You can store a template in a file outside your program. People can modify the template without modifying the program. You can separate the formatting details from the main code, and put the formatting parts of the program into the template. That prevents code bloat and encourages functional separation. You can fill in the template in a `Safe' compartment. This means tat if you don't trust the person who wrote the code in the template, you won't have to worry that they are tampering with your program when you execute it. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Text::Template was originally released some time in late 1995 or early 1996. After three years of study and investigation, I rewrote it from scratch in January 1999. The new version, 1.0, was much faster, delivered better functionality and was almost 100% backward-compatible with the previous beta versions. I have added a number of useful features and conveniences since the 1.0 release, while still retaining backward compatibility. With one merely cosmetic change, the current version of Text::Template passes the test suite that the old beta versions passed. Questions or comments should be addressed to mjd-perl-template@plover.com. This address goes directly to me, and not to anyone else; it is not a mailing list address. To receive occasional announcements of new versions of T::T, send an empty note to mjd-perl-template-request@plover.com. This mailing list is not for discussion; it is for announcements only. Therefore, there is no address for sending messages to the list. You can get the most recent version of Text::Template, news, comments, and other collateral information from . ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's new in v1.223since v1.22: Small bug fix: DELIMITER and other arguments were being ignored in calls to fill_in_file and fill_this_in. (Thanks to Jonathan Roy.) ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's new in v1.22 since v1.20: You can now specify that certain Perl statements be prepended to the beginning of every program fragment in a template, either per template, or for all templates, or for the duration of only one call to fill_in. This is useful, for example, if you want to enable `strict' checks in your templates but you don't want to manually add `use strict' to the front of every program fragment everywhere. ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's new in v1.20 since v1.12: You can now specify that the program fragment delimiters are strings other than { and }. This has three interesting effects: First, it changes the delimiter strings. Second, it disables the special meaning of \, so you have to be really, really sure that the delimiters will not appear in your templates. And third, because of the simplifications introduced by the elimination of \ processing, template parsing is 20-25% faster. See the manual section on `Alternative Delimiters'. Fixed bug having to do with undefined values in HASH options. In particular, Text::Template no longer generates a warning if you try to give a variable an undefined value. ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's new in v1.12 since v1.11: I forgot to say that Text::Template ISA Exporter, so the exported functions never got exported. Duhhh! Template TYPEs are now case-insensitive. The `new' method now diagnoses attempts to use an invalid TYPE. More tests for these things. ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's new in v1.11 since v1.10: Fixed a bug in the way backslashes were processed. The 1.10 behavior was incompatible with the beta versions and was also inconvenient. (`\n' in templates was replaced with `n' before it was given to Perl for evaluation.) The new behavior is also incompatible with the beta versions, but it is only a little bit incompatible, and it is probbaly better. Documentation for the new behavior, and tests for the bug. ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's new in v1.10 since v1.03: New OUTPUT option delivers template results directly to a filehandle instead of making them into a string. Saves space and time. PACKAGE and HASH now work intelligently with SAFE. Fragments may now output data directly to the template, rather than having to arrange to return it as a return value at the end. This means that where you used to have to write this: { my $blist = ''; foreach $i (@items) { $blist .= qq{ * $i\n}; } $blist; } You can now write this instead, because $OUT is special. { foreach $i (@items) { $OUT.= " * $i\n"; } } (`A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.') Fixed some small bugs. Worked around a bug in Perl that does the wrong thing with $x = when $x contains a glob. More documentation. Errors fixed. Lots more tests. ---------------------------------------------------------------- What's new in v1.03 since v1.0: Code added to support HASH option to fill_in. (Incl. `_gensym' function.) Documentation for HASH. New test file for HASH. Note about failure of lexical variables to propagate into templates. Why does this surprise people? Bug fix: program fragments are evaluated in an environment with `no strict' by default. Otherwise, you get a lot of `Global symbol "$v" requires explicit package name' failures. Why didn't the test program pick this up? Because the only variable the test program ever used was `$a', which is exempt. Duhhhhh. Fixed the test program. Various minor documentation fixes. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Improvements of 1.0 over the old 0.1beta: New features: At least twice as fast Better support for filling out the same template more than once Now supports evaluation of program fragments in Safe compartments. (Thanks, Jonathan!) Better argument syntax More convenience functions The parser is much better and simpler. Once a template is parsed, the parsed version is stored so that it needn't be parsed again. BROKEN function behavior is rationalized. You can now pass an arbitrary argument to your BROKEN function, or return a value from it to the main program. Documentation overhauled.