Template::Plugin::HTML(3)

NAME
Template::Plugin::HTML - Plugin to create HTML elements

SYNOPSIS
    [% USE HTML %]

    [% HTML.escape("if (a < b && c > d) ..." %]

    [% HTML.element(table => { border => 1, cellpadding => 2 }) %]

    [% HTML.attributes(border => 1, cellpadding => 2) %]

DESCRIPTION
The "HTML" plugin is a very basic plugin, implementing a few useful methods for generating HTML.

METHODS

  escape(text)
Returns the source text with any HTML reserved characters such as "<", ">", etc., correctly escaped to their entity equivalents.

  attributes(hash)
Returns the elements of the hash array passed by reference correctly formatted (e.g. values quoted and correctly escaped) as attributes for an HTML element.

  add_attribute(attributes)
This provides a way to incrementally add attributes to the object. The values passed in are stored in the object. Calling element with just a tag or attributes without an parameters will used the saved attributes.

    USE tag = HTML;
    tag.add_attributes( { class => 'navbar' } );
    tag.add_attributes( { id => 'foo' } );
    tag.add_attributes( { class => 'active' } );

    tag.element( 'li' ); # <li class="navbar active" id="foo">

This method has two aliases: add_attribute() and add().

  replace_attribute(attributes)
This will replace an attribute value instead of add to existing.

    USE tag = HTML;
    tag.add_attributes( { class => 'navbar' } );
    tag.add_attributes( { id => 'foo' } );
    tag.replace_attributes( { class => 'active' } );

    tag.element( 'li' ); # <li class="active" id="foo">

This method has two aliases: replace_attribute() and replace().

  clear_attributes
Clears any saved attributes

  element(type, attributes)
Generates an HTML element of the specified type and with the attributes provided as an optional hash array reference as the second argument or as named arguments.

    [% HTML.element(table => { border => 1, cellpadding => 2 }) %]
    [% HTML.element('table', border=1, cellpadding=2) %]
    [% HTML.element(table => attribs) %]

DEBUGGING
The HTML plugin accepts a "sorted" option as a constructor argument which, when set to any true value, causes the attributes generated by the "attributes()" method (either directly or via "element()") to be returned in sorted order. Order of attributes isn't important in HTML, but this is provided mainly for the purposes of debugging where it is useful to have attributes generated in a deterministic order rather than whatever order the hash happened to feel like returning the keys in.

    [% USE HTML(sorted=1) %]
    [% HTML.element( foo => { charlie => 1, bravo => 2, alpha => 3 } ) %]

generates:

    <foo alpha="3" bravo="2" charlie="1">

AUTHOR
Andy Wardley <abw@wardley.org> <http://wardley.org/>

COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 1996-2007 Andy Wardley. All Rights Reserved.

This module is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.

SEE ALSO
Template::Plugin