Re: [htmltmpl] how can I insert non-printing comments in templates?

[Cees H. <ce...@si...>]

Quoting Puneet Kishor <pk...@ei...>:

> While templates are supposed to be (almost) pure html, I want to insert 
> comments in the templates (for my benefit... all those loops within 
> loops get confusing after a while) that I don't want printed in the 
> browser. Would be nice to have some kind of meta template comment tag 
> that is stripped out while filling the templates on the server. 
> Something like --


There are a couple of ways to do this already:

First, just use a TMPL_IF construct that is always false:

<TMPL_IF NAME="comment">
 THis is a comment as long as the code never defines the variable 'comment'
</TMPL_IF>

or you could write a simple filter that strips out all your comments when you
load the template:

my $filter = sub {
      my $text_ref = shift;
      $$text_ref =~ s/\<\<\!\-\-.*?\-\-\>\>//g;
};

my $template = HTML::Template->new(filename => $template_file,
                                     filter => $filter);


The second one is probably preferrable, but I would use something besides <<! >>
as the delimiters,  Since they are not valid HTML, and also they are not easily
distinguishable from regular comments.  Why not something like <!--SRV Here is a
server side comment -->

Anyway, you have some options here to work with...

Cheers,

Cees