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The item that came in at the last minute on Friday has morphed from a "popular medicine" kind of article into the hard-core stuff, and I am hoping to get most of the way through it before calling it a night.
Along the way, I took some time to try to rehabilitate a Perl script I first wrote back in 1995, which does a rather straightforward search for terminology in a one-entry-per-line file. Actually, the script comes in two parts: the first is an HTML file that prompts for a term to search for, and the second is a Perl script that outputs HTML to display the results of a search and again prompt for a term to search for.
The first is a pretty simple piece of work, and my original HTML file worked with no modifications. The second file, on the other hand...
Well, as it turned out, the Perl script required the use of a library file called cgi-lib.pl that probably lives on some drive or disk somewhere around here (or in Pagosa) but not, apparently, on Google (not even as a searchable ghost). However, my Google search did turn up a CPAN module called CGI that at first glance appeared to do much the same thing, but had me frowning, because although I had some time available to tweak code, I did not feel like putting in a major learn-to-use-this session. But then I took a closer look at the module's page on CPAN, which provided some code examples, and it seemed to me that using the module was pretty straightforward for my needs. In fact, after a few minutes spent looking at the example code, I determined that I pretty much just needed to modify six lines of my original script to get the same functionality that cgi-lib.pl had provided (to wit, assigning the values of the parameters passed to the script to a set of variables used throughout the rest of the script).
Let me tell you, was as I surprised when, after modifying those six lines, the script just worked! (Though to be frank, I am still a little puzzled why that is so, for reasons that mostly have to do with the widespread use of UTF-8 these days, versus CP-1251 back in the day. OTOH, I shall refrain from examining the dental work of the gifted equine and just be happy.)
In any event, I was thus able to resurrect an old medical glossary to help me with the Friday item ("vestibular opto-oculomotor nystagmus," indeed!), and get it to within striking distance of being finished.
Cheers...
Along the way, I took some time to try to rehabilitate a Perl script I first wrote back in 1995, which does a rather straightforward search for terminology in a one-entry-per-line file. Actually, the script comes in two parts: the first is an HTML file that prompts for a term to search for, and the second is a Perl script that outputs HTML to display the results of a search and again prompt for a term to search for.
The first is a pretty simple piece of work, and my original HTML file worked with no modifications. The second file, on the other hand...
Well, as it turned out, the Perl script required the use of a library file called cgi-lib.pl that probably lives on some drive or disk somewhere around here (or in Pagosa) but not, apparently, on Google (not even as a searchable ghost). However, my Google search did turn up a CPAN module called CGI that at first glance appeared to do much the same thing, but had me frowning, because although I had some time available to tweak code, I did not feel like putting in a major learn-to-use-this session. But then I took a closer look at the module's page on CPAN, which provided some code examples, and it seemed to me that using the module was pretty straightforward for my needs. In fact, after a few minutes spent looking at the example code, I determined that I pretty much just needed to modify six lines of my original script to get the same functionality that cgi-lib.pl had provided (to wit, assigning the values of the parameters passed to the script to a set of variables used throughout the rest of the script).
Let me tell you, was as I surprised when, after modifying those six lines, the script just worked! (Though to be frank, I am still a little puzzled why that is so, for reasons that mostly have to do with the widespread use of UTF-8 these days, versus CP-1251 back in the day. OTOH, I shall refrain from examining the dental work of the gifted equine and just be happy.)
In any event, I was thus able to resurrect an old medical glossary to help me with the Friday item ("vestibular opto-oculomotor nystagmus," indeed!), and get it to within striking distance of being finished.
Cheers...
