html form generation problems

Dennis Roberts · Dec 21, 2004

I think I must be doing something wrong. I am attempting to generate a
form which values from existing data. Here is a simplified version of
what I am trying to do (see below). I don't get a form element with
this, I get something like:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2 Final//EN"><HTML><BODY><FORM
METHOD="post"
ENCTYPE="application/x-www-form-urlencoded">onetwothree</FORM></BODY></HTML>

I also notice the HEAD and TITLE tags are missing. Any advice?

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
require 'cgi'
cgi = CGI.new("html3")

ary = %w( one two three )

cgi.out do
cgi.html do
cgi.head do
cgi.title("Form Test")
end
cgi.body do
cgi.form do
ary.each do |value|
cgi.text_field(value, value)
end
end
end
end
end

why the lucky stiff · Dec 21, 2004

Dennis said:
I think I must be doing something wrong. I am attempting to generate
a form which values from existing data. Here is a simplified version
of what I am trying to do (see below). I don't get a form element
with this, I get something like:

I also notice the HEAD and TITLE tags are missing. Any advice?

You'll need to concatenate the various strings together to get this to
work. You might also consider using instance_eval to simplify things.

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w
require 'cgi'
cgi = CGI.new("html3")

ary = %w( one two three )

cgi.instance_eval do
out do
html do
head do
title { "Form Test" }
end +
body do
form do
ary.collect do |value|
text_field value, value
end.join + submit
end
end
end
end
end

_why

Dennis Roberts · Dec 21, 2004

This works! Thanks. What is the difference between each and collect?
With each it still didn't work, but it did with collect.

Thank you for your quick response.

why the lucky stiff · Dec 21, 2004

Dennis said:
This works! Thanks. What is the difference between each and collect?
With each it still didn't work, but it did with collect.

The `each' method merely walks an Array (or other Enumerable.) But
`collect' (a.k.a `map') walks the Array, replacing each element with the
result from the block. At the end of `collect', you have a new Array.

So, in the cgi example, you started with an array of:
['one', 'two', 'three']

The `collect' processes each through the `text_field' method and you
wind up with:
["<INPUT NAME=\"one\" SIZE=\"40\" TYPE=\"text\" VALUE=\"one\">",
"<INPUT NAME=\"two\" SIZE=\"40\" TYPE=\"text\" VALUE=\"two\">", "<INPUT
NAME=\"three\" SIZE=\"40\" TYPE=\"text\" VALUE=\"three\">"]

_why

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html form generation problems

Dennis Roberts

why the lucky stiff

Dennis Roberts

why the lucky stiff

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