misc software development snippets

Searching for examples of ruby/cgi usage didn't turn up much.

I had to rough it and unfortunately, it took longer than it should have to come up with what I wanted to accomplish. (well, more or less what I wanted, well, actually, it's not going to work for what I need but anyway, here's an working ruby/cgi example).

thought I'd share:

require 'cgi'
require 'json'

cgi = CGI.new('html4Tr') # add HTML generation methods

if cgi.params.empty?
  # no request recieved, return html
  cgi.out('charset' => 'UTF-8') do
    cgi.html() do
      cgi.head() do
        "\n" +
        cgi.title{"cgi testing"} +
        CGI.pretty(
          "\n" + %q(<meta http-equiv="cache-control" content="no-cache">
          <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
          <meta http-equiv="expires" content="Mon, 22 Jul 2002 11:12:01 GMT">
          <meta http-equiv="pragma" content="no-cache">
          <script type="text/javascript" src="../js/jquery-1.3.2.js">)
        )
      end +
      cgi.body() do
        CGI.pretty(
          "\n" + %q(<input type='hidden' id="ids" value='' />
          <!-- start: show results -->
          <div id="show_hide_container" style="display:none"><a id="hide_n_show">[-]</a></div>
          <div id="action_results"></div>
          <!-- end: show results -->
          <div id="display_results">
            <div class="show_demo" id="unique" style="height:100%"></div>
          </div>)
        ) \
         +
        cgi.form() do
          cgi.textarea("get_text") +
          cgi.br +
          cgi.submit
        end +
        cgi.pre() do
          CGI::escapeHTML(
            "params: " + cgi.params.inspect + "\n" +
            "cookies: " + cgi.cookies.inspect + "\n" +
            ENV.collect() do |key, value|
              key + " --> " + value + "\n"
            end.join("")
          )
        end
      end
    end
  end
else
  # request recieved, return as JSON
  cgi = CGI.new(:encoding => 'UTF-8')
  print cgi.header('type' => 'application/x-javascript', 'charset' => 'UTF-8')
  print cgi.params.to_json
end