Danny Sauer  Sent: 2006 Jan 24, Tue 14:07
> James wrote regarding 'RE: [OT] what about "wiki"' on Tue, 
> Jan 24 at 15:37:
> > Now, the bold and underline would have been no easier in a 
> wiki. They 
> > would still require the [b][u] and the ending tags in reverse order 
> > [/u][/b] after that.
> 
> Actually, the wiki I use does ''bold'' and '''underline''', 
> and most I've worked with don't use bbcode in general. ;)

Wow, that is even more cryptic in my mind. If I were going to do that stuff,
I would probably try to find a good regexp to do *bold words* and
_underlined stuff_ as well as /italicised text or whatever./  I'd use - for
bullet points at the start of a line and # for numbered lists.

But as Olin points out, that could be just as confusing if it were not
expected.


> > If people really want, I can add a little translator that 
> converts any 
> > lines starting with a * into a <LI> and puts a <UL> before 
> the first 
> > and a </UL> after the last.... Finding the first and last 
> may be a bit 
> > tricky... Lets see...
> 
> It'd be easier if you used a state machine which remembers 
> whether or not it's in a list.  If it's not in a list, it 
> appends a <ul> to the first line it finds that begins with *, 
> and proceeds to do a s/^\s*\*(.*)$/<li>$1<\/li>/ (presuming 
> perl processing a line at a
> time) until that doesn't do a replacement, in which case you 
> put a </ul> in front of the line which wasn't subject to 
> replacement and switch state back to "not in a list".

Much better idea. But I don't think I'll implement the idea anyway.

> > Replace $\* with $\<LI\> which is dead easy
> > 
> > Then replace $[^<][^L][^I][^>](.*)\n\<LI\> with $1\<\/UL\>\<LI\>
> > 
> > and replace \<LI\>(.*)\n[^<][^L][^I][^>] with \<LI\>$1\n\<\/UL\>
> > 
> > Does that look right? Regexp gurus?
> 
> Does your regexp environment of choice not support negative 
> assertions?  Using three extra chars for each negative entity 
> seems bad, if for no other reason than legibility. :) Either 
> way, the second one will throw away a non-<li> tag preceding 
> a line with an <li>.  You probably want to include the tag in 
> the group both in regexp2 and 3 as well as including the 
> newline in regexp2, like this:
> 
> replace \*([^\n]+) with <li>$1</li>
> replace ([^<][^L][^I][^>].*\n)<LI> with $1<UL><LI> replace 
> (<LI>.*)\n[^<][^L][^I][^>] with $1\n</UL>

Ahh yes, thanks for the fix. Good grief, I even had $ and ^ reversed in my
head. 

> Though that'd look prettier if you used line start 'n end 
> anchors and found a way to do a negative assertion - kinda 
> like (!<LI>).  Of course, then you'd have to use $1$2 instead 
> of $1, etc...
> 
> --Danny, amused that he complained about someone making a 
> regular expression illegible...

Sort of an oxymoron huh? From 
http://techref.massmind.org/techref/language/regxs.htm Some people, when
confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now
they have two problems. --Jamie Zawinski, in comp.lang.emacs 

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