I've been getting some strange characters and corrupted layouts appearing in my html pages. Part of the html code is generated by a perl script and I was wondering which of the following methods is correct and if there is anything that might be causing the problems. My script loops through and combines abot 40+ of the $output before returning the final result.

Method 1:
$output.="<tr bgcolor=$backgound_color>\n";
$output.="<td width=\"150\">\n";
$output.="<div align=\"right\"><font face=\"Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif\" size=\"2\"><b>$display_item_name</b></font></div></td>\n";
$output.="<td width=\"340\">\n";
$output.="<div align=\"left\"><font face=\"Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif\" size=\"2\">$display_item_value</font></div></td>\n";
$output.="<td width=\"150\"><font face=\"Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif\" size=\"2\">$add_link | $modify_link | $delete_link </font></td></tr>\n";

Method 2:
$output.="<tr bgcolor=$backgound_color>
<td width=\"150\">
<div align=\"right\"><font face=\"Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif\" size=\"2\"><b>$display_item_name</b></font></div>
</td>
<td width=\"340\">
<div align=\"left\"><font face=\"Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif\" size=\"2\">$display_item_value</font></div>
</td>
<td width=\"150\"><font face=\"Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif\" size=\"2\">
$add_link | $modify_link | $delete_link </font></td>
</tr>";


Any ideas?
Thank You.

I would personally use something like;


This evades the problems of having to escape quotes and stuff :)

Cheers

Andy (mod)
andy@ultranerds.co.uk

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Thanks Andy!!
That does the job.
In fact, I also tried the following as well -

$var = <<HTML_CODE;
something here
something here
HTML_CODE

that's what I prefer, but it seems really odd and un-Perl-like that a bare word is the closing deliminator in a block, and that it MUST appear at the beginning of a line, by itself.

Philip
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Limecat is not pleased.