make my file readable as either Perl or HTML

Posted by JoelFan on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by JoelFan
Published on 2010-03-09T04:41:05Z Indexed on 2010/03/09 4:51 UTC
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In the spirit of the "Perl Preamble" where a script works properly whether executed by a shell script interpreter or the Perl interpreter...

I have a Perl script which contains an embedded HTML document (as a "heredoc"), i.e.:

#!/usr/bin/perl

... some perl code ...

my $html = <<'END' ;
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>

... more HTML ...

</html>
END

... perl code that processes $html ...

I would like to be able to work on the HTML that's inside the Perl script and check it out using a web browser, and only run the script when the HTML is the way I want. To accomplish this, I need the file to be openable both as an HTML file and as a Perl script.

I have tried various tricks with Perl comments and HTML comments but can't get it quite perfect. It doesn't have to be "strictly legal" HTML... just displayable in a browser with no (or minimal) Perl garbage visible.

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