How to paste program code

Question

I write about programming, and thus I paste a lot of programming code into my articles. I've written that code elsewhere, since I test it first.
I'm trying to find out how do this in the easiest way in Dreamweaver. I've found Paste Special, but it works so-so.
Say that I have this in my Perl script:
if (a > 27) {
   print "Looks like a is greater than 27 today\n";
Then I want to take that piece of code and paste into my HTML file, so that I get:
<pre>if (a &gt; 27) {
    print &quot;Looks like a is greater than 27 today\n&quot;;
}</pre>
If I use Text only, all line breaks are thrown away I get all on a single line:
if (a > 27) {   print "Looks like a is greater than 27 today\n";}
Which is useless. If I instead ask to retain the structure and line breaks, and select Preformatted before I go ahead I get this:
<pre>if (a &gt; 27) {<br>
print &quot;Looks like a is greater than 27 today\n&quot;;<br>
}</pre>
That is, the original line breaks are retained and <BR> tags are added. At the same time the indenting is lost. Sure, I can go through the code to clean it it up, and while removing the <br> tags can be done with Find/Replace, restoring the indentation is more work.
It should also be clear from the example, that doing the pasting in Code view is not a good option.
Am I missing something, or does Dreamweaver not offer any better alternative?

Answer 1

Thanks Nancy, but I don't think your example will work for me.
If I understand it correctly, you code style works, because:
You have only one level on indentation.
You always have blank line before next line in the outermost column.
All paragraphs start in column 1.
None of these are true for the code I work with. As one example look at http://www.sommarskog.se/dyn-search-2008.html#sp_executesql.
The workaround I have employed is to do this particular operation in Expression Web, which has Paste Text->One <pre> formatted paragraph. It's a good thing that Dreamweaver detects that the file has changed outside Dreamweaver.
(And if you wonder why I try out Dreamweaver when I have Expression Web already, the answer is simple: EW is buggy.)