From: Eric Schwartz <emschwar@...>
Date: 2004-02-20T20:23:03+09:00
Subject: Re: another silly cgi question

Cere Davis <cere@u.washington.edu> writes:
> Hello Ruby cgi geniuses,
>
> I cannot figure out how to print html content within the same scope as
> the cgi.xx object.  That is:  When I try and run this:
>
>
> cgi.out() do
> cgi.html() do
> cgi.body() do
> 	p userinfo.to_s

        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

That's your problem.  I'm not sure what 'userinfo' is here, but the
pickaxe says about Kernel#p:

   For each object, directly writes anObject.inspect followed by the
   current output record separator to the program's standard output. p
   bypasses the Ruby I/O libraries

That means that as soon as you call 'p userinfo.to_s', that gets
printed immediately, instead of as part of your CGI output.  This Is
Bad(tm).

The block you pass to CGI#body should return a string, which will be
the contents of the '<body>' '</body>' tags.  Instead, you're printing
something to stdout, then building your string below, and after the
string is built, the cgi routines spit out their HTML elements, with
your string inside it.

Also, your indentation is inconsistent and too hard to read at the
start for my taste, and you don't need the () if you're not passing
parameters to the HTML-generating methods.  I'd prefer something that
looked like:

cgi.out { # or 'do'..'end', whatever you like
  cgi.html {
    cgi.body {
      userinfo.to_s +
      cgi.form('get') { # I only use "" when I'm interpolating variables
        cgi.params.collect { |key,val|
           key + ' ' +    # HTML collapses spaces, so no need to put 
           cgi.text_field(key,val) + # multiple ones here.
           cgi.br 
        }.join("\n") +    # I like "\n" here, as it makes the generated
        cgi.br +          # HTML easier to read.
        cgi.submit("How's this?")
      }
    }
  }
}

>  Does anyone know how to shim your own html into the cgi object so
> that it will run correctly?

I realize that at this very instant, Ruby makes that harder than
necessary, but "Programming Ruby" is a decent reference, and is (most
importantly) free.  If you check out the documentation there, you'll
see they provide a better and more complete explanation of cgi.rb than
I have here.

Thanks to Dave Thomas and many others, 'ri' will soon become the
standard reference for Ruby documentation.  I can't wait for the day
the default response to any 'what is wrong with this code?' query
becomes, "Did you read the documentation on your hard drive?"

-=Eric
-- 
Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million
typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare.
		-- Blair Houghton.