assign Tag

Purpose: Assign text to a Variable.

Variable must be a valid variable name or object field.

Anything you type between the opening and closing assign tags is processed in HTML mode where the resulting string output is not sent to the browser, as usual, but stored in the Variable.

Useful when a lengthy text is to be produced using some of the formatting features of heitml.

Here's a Source Code example that uses the assign Tag to store a nice little heitml demo routine in a variable gl._prg. (We won't go into detail about the inner workings of the routine itself other than to explain that you can easily adapt it to many purposes, including to convert a string of text to a furl argument that could be passed to another page on the URL line of your Browser.)

Example:

<assign gl._prg> <\let x="Convert this string to a furl."> <\? x> <\br> x is <\? len(x)> characters long. <\br> <\let i=0; z=""; while i<len(x); if x[i]==" "; z=z+"+"; else z=z+x[i]; /if; i=i+1; /while; ? z> <\br> z is also <\? len(z)> characters. </assign>

Now that we've stored the routine into the variable gl._prg, here's what happens when you use the ? Tag to display the contents of the variable.

Example:

input:	resulting output:
<? gl._prg>	x is characters long. z is also characters.

Notice that heitml automatically knew it should omit the escape characters "\" to show the Code in its pure form (i.e. the normal form you would use if you were executing the code directly, without having assigned it to a variable.

And here's what happens when we tell heitml to interpret the contents of the gl._prg variable as heitml Source Code to be executed:

Example:

input:	resulting output:
<? gl._prg heitml>	Convert this string to a furl. x is 30 characters long. Convert+this+string+to+a+furl. z is also 30 characters.