Re: [MacPerl] (QXP => HTML) && OOP

[Fred Fenimore <ffenimore@scholastic.com>]

At 9:40 PM -0800 3/27/97, Richard Pfeiffer wrote:
>Strictly speaking, this is a Perl question, but I am asking it in a
>Mac-oriented context, and it may be helpful to others on the list right
>now, so I hope you'll bear with me :)
>
>...
>
>As you can see, I have to have a hard-coded reference variable name
>($Style1, $Style2, etc.) for each new style sheet object, when what I'd
>like to be able to do is refer to it indirectly by setting the value of a
>scalar to the variable name, and then using that as a reference.  I tried
>setting up a scalar to contain the name of a style sheet, and then
>referencing/dereferencing it, but I was told this wasn't allowed.
>
>Is there a way to do this in Perl?
>

I did do an identical project recently and found using multi-dimensional
hashes worked pretty well.

%ssdef{"Body_Text"}{SIZE} = 12;
%ssdef{"Body_Text"}{FONT} = "Times";

and so on...

This might be one of those cases where the tool debate comes up.  You know
that every problem has its own tool and not every tool applies to every
problem.  In this case, I am not sure what advantage using the OO paradigm
would get you.  From your description, you simply are wanting a table of
values.  I would not promote data to a "first class" object unless the data
contained had to be transmorgified in some manner.

Of course if you really want to do objects, I have found that when I have
varying variable names that I must use, I simply put that part of the code
into an eval statement.  The drawback is the data created polutes the
global namespace but sometimes you take the bad with the good.

BTW (off the subject)
Did you write the xtags parser yourself?  What approach did you take?  I
did it by slurping the file into one long string then used about 2 dozen
global search replace statemnts to seperate the tags.  Then I used even
more s//mg's to convert it to my final format.  Ran into problems with the
tags that contain quoted material though...

Of course we had to go to pretty great lengths to "fix" text that had the
wrong style sheet applied, e.g. text set in headline format which then they
change the font, size, face to match what normally would be body text.

Hope this helps,

Fred


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