Rubenerd: Text::Template as a Perl Jinja alternative

Ruben likes
Programming Perl

The Camel Book was my first *nix programming tome, so even after all these years I couldn’t resist making a terrible CSS omage to it! But I digress.

Jinja2 is Python’s killer app for me. I’m familiar enough with it from using Ansible scripts and internal work projects, but I’d be the first to admit I only know enough Python to be dangerous. What I’d love is something with similar flexibility and syntax, but using Perl data structures with which I’m more familiar.

I’ve been playing around with Text::Template by Michael Schout, and so far it does everything I want. It has substitution, easy iterators, and inline code blocks. You can use it to create everything from mail merged forms to fully-blown website templates.

Here’s a simple example of a hash being passed to a template:

#!/usr/bin/env perl    
    
use strict;
use warnings;
use 5.016;
use Text::Template;
binmode(STDOUT, ":utf8");    
    
## An example data structure
my %data(
    name    => 'Kenny Rogers',
    message => 'when to hold it, when to fold it...'
);    
    
## Create a template
my $template = Text::Template->new(
    ENCODING => 'UTF-8',
    SOURCE   => 'my-template.tmpl',
    TYPE     => 'FILE'
) or die "Can't parse template: $Text::Template::ERROR\n";
    
## Pass hash to template and print
my $page = $template->fill_in(HASH => \%data);
say $page;

And the template:

Hello {$name}, you told me: {$message}.

Nice! And I can already see how this would integrate with a Moose program. meta::cpan has more details.

Author bio and support