[Pmwiki-users] multiline markup

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 01:14:49PM -0500, pmwikiuser at estrider.com wrote:
> 
> I\'m trying to create a markup that will handle multiple lines (strings
> with newline characters),  but I\'ve been running into problems with
> regex matching.  My problem is that (.*?) will not match \\n and the
> ways I know to get around it don\'t seem to work in the context of a
> Markup() statement. 

There's several factors at work here.  First, the normal way to get (.*?) 
to match newlines is to add the /s option to the end of the pattern, 
as in "/abcd(.*?)efg/se" .

Then, it's important to note that one of PmWiki's markup rules splits
the texts into separate lines to be able to do line-by-line processing
of the contents (as well as for performance reasons).  Thus, if you 
want to match things with newlines in them, you have to do one of the
following:
   1. Set your markup to occur sometime before the 'split' transformation --
      i.e., within the "fulltext" section.  The (:if:)/(:ifend:)
      markups do this.
   2. Capture the target of the the markup containing the newlines
      inside of a [=...=] or [@...@] section.  The (:markup:) and
      Cookbook.Beautifier give examples of doing this.
   3. Treat the begin/end markups as separate rules and maintain the
      state in global variables.  The (:table:), (:cell:), and (:tableend:)
      markups operate this way.

> Any suggestions on how to make:
>     (:BOB:) some
>     multi line
>     text
>     (:BOBEND:)
> become 
>     <span id=\'BOB\'>some
>     multi line
>     text
>     </span>

You probably want to use <div> instead of <span> here, because 
<span> cannot contain other block markup (<p>, <ul>, <li>, etc.) and
each of the things inside of the BOB/BOBEND will generate some sort of
block markup.  Also, remember that if you use id="..." then there
can only be one such BOB/BOBEND sequence in a page (HTML requires
id attributes to be unique).

That said, this looks a lot like the (:table:) markup, so you might look
at that for some ideas (in scripts/stdmarkup.php).  This also reminds me
that I still need to implement (:div:).  When I do that (for 2.0.beta15), 
would this work for you...?

   (:div id='BOB') some
   multi
   line
   text
   (:divend:)

generating

   <div id='bob'> some
   multi
   line
   text
   </div>

Of course, you could then easily alias (:BOB:)/(:BOBEND:) to the 
appropriate (:div id='BOB':) and (:divend:) markups.  And if you're
really intending this to be sections for different authors, we could
even write a Cookbook so that the end tags are automatically generated,
and the following would work:

   BOB> some multi
   line text (including lists, pre, etc.) rendered with
   Bob's settings inside of a <div class='BOB'>

   ALICE> closes Bob's section, starts
   new text rendered with
   Alice's settings inside of a <div class='ALICE'>

   BOB>  Another section of responses 
   and comments for Bob

   >  this ends whatever section was last open and returns to "normal"
   text

Although if we do something like this we should probably integrate it
with WikiStyles somehow (not difficult).

Pm