CGI::Application and HTML::Lint

samtregar on 2003-06-13T17:14:18

I just recently learned about HTML::Lint from petdance's journal. I immediately wanted to integrate it into my latest web project. Here's how I did it using CGI::Application's new cgiapp_postrun() method in my CGI::Application super-class:

# check for HTML errors
sub cgiapp_postrun {
  my ($self, $o) = @_;

  # parse the output with HTML::Lint
  my $lint = HTML::Lint->new();
  $lint->parse($$o);
  $lint->eof();

  # if there were errors put them into a
  # new window
  if ($lint->errors) {
      my $err_text = "
" . 
        join("", map { "
$_
" }
                 map { s/&/&/g;
                       s//>/g;
                       s/\\/\\\\/g;
                       s/"/\\"/g;
                       $_; }
                 map { $_->as_string }
                   $lint->errors) .
                 "
";
    my $js = <
  var html_lint_window = window.open("", "html_lint_window", "height=300,width=600");
html_lint_window.document.write("
HTML Errors Detected
$err_text");
  html_lint_window.document.close();
  html_lint_window.focus(); 

END

    # insert the js code before the body close,
    # if one exists
    if ($$o =~ m!!) {
      $$o =~ s!!$js\n!;
    } else {
      $$o .= $js;
    }
  }
}

Using this code, when one or more HTML errors are detected a new window pops up with the errors in a list. The window is reused on future requests if not closed.

-sam