Re: report generation with format/write

Larry Wall <[email protected]> writes:
> [email protected] writes:
> : Does anyone actually teach report generation with format/write?  I
> : haven't really seen anyone using it much in the last few years, but I've
> : just had a corporate client ask us to teach "reports" in Perl.
> : 
> : It's not part of our standard introductory Perl course, and to be honest
> : I'm dreading having to write it ... ick ick ick.
> 
> Unless line printers come back into vogue, I wouldn't put a lot of
> stress on it.  These days, most reports are printed on browser screens.
> 
> The fact is, the whole fixed-width character culture is in serious
> trouble with the advent of Unicode.  Even xterm is having to come to
> terms with double-wide characters these days.  We'll probably have to
> do something similar with format/write.  (What we probably ought to do
> is redo the report writer to spit out XML tables or some such. :-)/2
> 
> On the other hand, maybe fixed-width characters will be viewed as retro
> and cool in 5 years.  You never know, you know...

A client I was working for last year needed some help with their
reporting tools - it seems that the HTML table-based reports were not
very popular and they wanted fixed-width type reports.

So I wrote something using formline (because the table column widths
were dependent on which columns were in that particular report) that
did the same thing.  Then I did some obscene voodoo with s/// to add
HTML links to some of the numbers for drill-down.  The whole thing was
thrown between <PRE> and </PRE> tags.

It was extremely well received.

I teach format and write in my classes, and I always explain that it's
most commonly used nowadays for reports that go out in e-mail
messages.  I don't teach formline though.

--Bill.

-- 
William R Ward        [email protected]      http://www.bayview.com/~hermit/
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