WWW::Spyder
Javascript tricks
serial() join function
Smart quotes
Text to Excel
Developing Featherweight Web Services with JavaScript
Perl: TT2 context
A quick snippet useful for letting your templates know their context.
my $pre_define = {
Server => $ENV{SERVER_NAME},
Live => $ENV{SERVER_NAME} =~ /\.com$/ ? 1 : 0,
};
# or in PRE_DEFINE if you want them for PRE_PROCESS
my $Config = { VARIABLES => $pre_define, };
my $template = Template->new($Config);
$template->process( ... );
Then your templates know if they are live and what their proper server
is. Eg, [% Live ? 'Live server!' : 'Dev server' %]
Here’s a snippet to get the server name with JavaScript too.
Perl: Ordinals and a TT2 filter
There is a module by the lovely Sean Burke to do abbreviated ordinals already: Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate. Still, it’s an interesting and pretty easy problem, and the module is pretty obscure so it’s not likely to be on your webhost. There’s also an example of how to use it as a Template Toolkit filter.
sub ordinal { $_[0] =~ /^(?:\d+|\d[,\d]+\d+)$/ or return $_[0]; return "$_[0]nd" if $_[0] =~ /(?<!1)2$/; return "$_[0]rd" if $_[0] =~ /(?<!1)3$/; return "$_[0]st" if $_[0] =~ /(?<!1)1$/; return "$_[0]th"; }
print ordinal($_), " " for 0 .. 21;
0th 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th 9th 10th 11th 12th 13th 14th 15th 16th 17th 18th 19th 20th 21st
my %Config =
(
FILTERS => { ordinal => sub { ordinal($_[0]) }
);
my $tt2 = Template->new(\%Config);
# et cetera ... This is your [% user.visits | ordinal %] visit!
Here is a link to show you how you can do ordinals with JavaScript. Or use Perl and the Lingua::EN::Number::Ordinate with TT2.
JavaScript: ucFirst()
Prototyping in JavaScript is a great way to extend base object types. In this case we find JavaScript’s string handling lacking compared with Perl’s. All we want it to titlecase a string just like Perl’s ucfirst(). So we add the Perl functionality to JavaScript strings by adding a prototype to the String object.
Here is a technique for doing titlecase with JavaScript.
//----- (c)GPL, apv
String.prototype.ucFirst = function () {
return this.substr(0,1).toUpperCase() + this.substr(1,this.length);
} <script type="text/javascript">
var me = new String('ashley')
document.write( me.ucFirst() )
</script> Perl: Kill unprintables
Sometimes characters make it into your data that just don’t belong. This recipe kills them dead (please don’t sue me, Raid) by substituting them out. Be careful, It alters files in place but it will give you a backup with the suffix .bk in the same folder/directory so you have the original saved if it does something terrible. Warning: Don’t use it on binary files (images, database files, etc); they’re supposed to contain what they contain.
It’s a one liner and it’s feedback free.
perl -pi.bk -e 's/[^\s[:print:]]//g'
jinx[607]>perl -pi.bk -e 's/[^\s[:print:]]//g' [filenames]
JavaScript: Referrer query catcher
This little function allows you to get the query term out of a referring URL. So if someone finds you on a search engine, you have instant access to how they did it. The information is also probably available from your web logs but this way you can use it dynamically in a page for feedback or autopopulating boxes or selecting related items to display on the page.
The regex below isn’t perfect but it catches the query correctly in better than 95% of the search engines I’ve run it against. Certain search engines, like AOLsearch, don’t keep the query in the URL so it catches the query ID instead.
//----- might be a better version but this is pretty solid
//----- (c)GPL, apv
function getRefQuery () {
var Refer = document.referrer
if ( ! Refer ) return false
q = Refer.match(/(q(([^=]*)|kw)?|p)=([^"&;]+)/)
if ( ! q ) return false
//----- no cross-script hacking, please
var qry = unescape( q[ ( q.length - 1 ) ] )
qry = qry.replace(/</g, '<')
qry = qry.replace(/>/g, '>')
qry = qry.replace(/\+/g, ' ')
if ( ! qry.match(/\w/) ) return false
return qry
}
//----- I like javascript now In the html of a page
<head> <script type="text/javascript" src="util.js"></script> <title>...</title> </head><body> You came here by searching for: <script type="text/javascript"> var q = getRefQuery() document.write( q ? q : 'nothing in particular' ) </script> <noscript> ...you have to turn on JavaScript, 'fraidy cat </noscript>
You came here searching for
Perl: random hex colors
Creating random hex colors in perl in regular (6 chars) and CSS-lite (3 chars).
sub random_hex_color { # only allowed values are 3 and 6, 6 is default my $size = shift; $size = 6 if $size !~ /^3|6$/; my @hex = ( 0 .. 9, 'a' .. 'f' ); my @color; push @color, @hex[rand(@hex)] for 1 .. $size; return join('', '#', @color); }
for ( 1 .. 8 ) {
print random_hex_color(), " ";
}
print "\n";
for ( 1 .. 12 ) {
print random_hex_color(3), " ";
} #98b6e3 #18dcc9 #4f79f5 #2a8513 #c5c7b0 #77953c #d95481 #8ba629 #ba9 #5a8 #b46 #968 #d7b #929 #885 #234 #987 #c68 #de0 #6a4