Adding Link Checking

We’re going to put just one more little embellishment into the make_page.cgi script. At the end of the &regenerate_links process, it would be nice to run the quick-and-dirty version of the link-checking script we saw back in Chapter 11 (the one that just checked for breakage in links pointing to files in the local filesystem). The idea here is that the user has just added some pages to the site, with IMG and A tags pointing to other files on the site, and it would be nice to run a quick check to let the user know if any of those links were broken.

As it turned out, nothing could be easier. We can just stick a copy of that first version of the link checker in the same directory as make_page.cgi and modify its configuration variables to point it at the CyberFair site. We should also set it to output its results as HTML.

Then we add the following to the end of the &regenerate_site_links subroutine in make_page.cgi: 

my $report = `$fs_root/maint/link_check.plx`;

if ($report =~ /<BODY>(.+)<\/BODY>/s) {
    $content .= $1;
}

&show_links;

That just runs the link checker using backticks (`), captures the output into $report, and then uses a regular expression to extract just the portion of the report between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags. That report is appended to the $content variable, so any broken links are reported to the user in the results page he sees after invoking &regenerate_site_links.

There are several things that the scripts described in these last four chapters ...

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