[pmwiki-users] Clarification on table editing question

[Chris Cox]

Gabriel Beal wrote:
> After I wrote the previous question I realized that I wasn't stating my 
> problem correctly.  The problem is caused by having a column that is a 
> continuation of another column, like this:
> 
> ||Names|| || Numbers|| ||More Names|| || More Numbers||
> ||Names|| || Numbers|| ||More Names|| || More Numbers||
> ||Names|| || Numbers|| ||More Names|| || More Numbers||
> ||Names|| || Numbers|| ||More Names|| || More Numbers||
> 
> I want to be able to insert a name and phone number into the 3rd and 4th 
> columns.  I know I could solve it by having just 2 really long columns, 
> but I was wondering if there is any solution using this set up.  It was 
> also suggested to me to maintain a separate plain text list and use a 
> perl script to wikify it.  I could go with that but ideally the list 
> would be editable by the non-technical people who are also using it.

Well.. there's nothing saying that the source file of names/numbers
can't be a wiki page itself.  It's not terribly hard to parse a wiki
page especially if it's void of special markups.  Thus the multiple
column thing becomes a read-only view of the data.  With extra work,
a special markup could be done to produce the multi-column list
with data embedded within the markup begin/end so that this could
all be done in one page (with a little bit of effort).