[pmwiki-users] Page File Format: why? Tools to handle?

[Oliver Betz]

"Ben Wilson" wrote:

>> what were the reasons for the current method to store page markup text
>> (in one line, with newline and percent sign converted)?
>
>Think of the wiki page storage as a hash (associative array), with
>each row of the file being a different key/value pair. When the page
>is read into such a hash, then calling a specific value is a simple
>hash reference. Specifically relating to the page text, it is
>"$Page['text']"

well, that's the representation in PHP after reading from the page
data file.

> Aliasing the newlines allows all the page text to be
>displayed on one line this way.

...making the read and write functions of PageStore very simple. As I
understand PM's mail, that was the reason.

>This approach differs from DokuWiki where the current page is in one
>file, and all metadata (including history) is stored separately.

IMO that's another point. I can store the data without aliasing
newlines but still with metadata and history.

I _strongly_ dislike the DokuWiki approach to separate metadata and
page text. One of the reasons for me not to use DokuWiki although it
looks nice besides this.

>As far as accessing the data separately, the PmWiki approach is
>actually quite technology independent. What I mean is you can grep out
>the page text and pipe through sed to display the source the way it is
>written. I've used grep/sed, and Python both to read PmWiki pages.

do you want to share this? One could use this along with the
diff/merge tool.

You don't have a solution to put changes back to the page data file?

[...]

>> Before I start to hack an import filter for Beyond Compare: Are there
>> tools to convert, compare, edit the pages?
>>
>> Maybe I'm simply using the wrong tools...
>
>I'd need a bit more specificity for me to help here. If you're talking

See my answer to Patrick.

Oliver
-- 
Oliver Betz, Muenchen (oliverbetz.de)