I'm writing a web based calander, and want to display a month (or more) in a html table, add links and pull out whatever data is associated with the link (ala the yahoo datebook).

Now i've got it printing out a nice little table with all the dates in the correct spots etc, (which is good) but i'm iterating thru' three loops. one to pull out the days, one to build a monthly matrix (much like the `cal` command), and the final loop builds the html.

I'm thinking this is pretty slow and inefficient, and was wondering if there is a better way.

I thought of using a hash for the number of days in a month (and making the appropriate exceptions for a LY, then determining what day is the 1st of the month) however i'm still stuck with two loops.

Naturally any comments on the style of the code appreciated.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
use Date::Calc qw( Delta_Days Add_Delta_Days Date_to_Text );
use CGI;
 
my $q = new CGI;
 
 
sub date_range {
    my(@date) = (@_)[0,1,2];
    my(@list);
    my($i);
    my $output = '';
 
    my $date;
    my %pos = (Su=>1,
               Mo=>2,
               Tu=>3,
               We=>4,
               Th=>5,
               Fr=>6,
               Sa=>7
              );
    my @box;
 
    $i = Delta_Days(@_);
    while ($i-- >= 0) {
        push( @list, [ @date ] );
        @date = Add_Delta_Days(@date, 1) if ($i >= 0);
    }
 
    #build the matrix to hold the days.
    my @box;              #the arrray to hold the calendar data
    my $row=0;
    foreach $date (@list) {
        my $col = $pos{substr(Date_to_Text(@{$date}),0,2)};
        $box[$row][$col]= (@{$date}[2]);
        if ($col eq 7) {$row++}
    }
 
    for (my $i=0; $i<5; $i++){
        $output .= "<tr>";
        for (my $j=0; $j<8;$j++){
                if (! defined $box[$i][$j]) {
                $output .= $q->td({align=>"right"},"&nbsp");
            } else {
                $output .= $q->td({align=>"right"},$box[$i][$j]);
           }
        }
        $output .= "</tr>";
 
    }
    return $output;
}
 
print $q->header();
print $q->table(&date_range(2001,11,1, 2001,11,30)); # in chronologica
+l order
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