Re: [MacPerl] any practical eg.s for macperl day2day usage?

[Neil Kandalgaonkar <njk@odyssee.net>]

>what might one use macperl for in day to day tasks?
>what might one use it for in any sort of production environment?
>I need to envision examples...

I think the question is more like "what can you NOT do with (Mac)Perl?"

For any manipulation of text files, searching through text files with
complicated criteria, extraction and formatting of results, simple database
management, web cgis, and so on and so on, Perl (& MacPerl) is
devastatingly powerful. Some people even like MacPerl better than
AppleScript for scripting Mac applications.

The sort of thing at which Perl is great:

On some of the websites I've done, I used MacPerl to make a discussion
system. On such systems, it is nice to allow the user to have the option of
posting HTML. But, you don't want to make things complicated for the users
who just post text.

Instead of having complicating the interface, I decided to have MacPerl
decide whether the post 'looks like' HTML or plain text. If it's plaintext,
<BR>s and other HTML-ifying tags are added. Then it strips out
suspicious-looking or disallowed HTML, and prettifies links by sending them
to a new TARGET= window. It also translates HTML entities. Then this file
is served back to another cgi, via AppleEvents, where it gets written into
a database. (it would have been faster to do this all in MacPerl, but my
boss prefers expensive, less powerful, time-consuming solutions.)

Sounds complicated, but the script is only a few lines long (minus some
HTML entity data).

There are other ways to do this; for instance, AppleScript, buffed up with
3rd-party scripting extensions, could do SOME of this in about 1 minute. (I
know because that's the way we used to do it.) MacPerl does it all in less
than a second, on a puny 6100/60.


--
Neil Kandalgaonkar    njk@odyssee.net    http://www.odyssee.net/~njk/



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