[pmwiki-users] New Recipe: IntuitiveSpacing

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 07:51:17PM +0000, Hans wrote:
> Thursday, March 15, 2007, 7:40:28 PM, Patrick wrote:
> 
> > Ouch.  You're likely to run into many problems with this, then,
> > because any spaces that occur in the middle of HTML tags will also 
> > be converted.  For example, suppose someone creates a markup function
> > that somehow produces:
> 
> >     <div id='mymarkup'   class='xyz'>...</div>
> 
> > They'll be very surprised when the triple spaces inside the element attributes
> > are converted to "&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;" .  And I think it's unreasonable to
> > require that recipe writers avoid multiple spaces in HTML tags the recipe
> > produces, since they're perfectly legal otherwise.
> 
> > So, at the very least the function needs to make sure that any spaces it is
> > converting aren't in the middle of an HTML tag.
> 
> would it perhaps work if the space conversion gets done after style in
> the markup translation? This would allow the spaces in wiki styles as
> in Site.PageActions.

It would probably help, yes.

> How do I filter out the html tags though? I need to create a function
> for this, and when(where) shall the spacing markup run then in the markup
> translation table?

You might try something like the following for the pattern:

    "/(\\s{2,7})(?![^<]*>)/e"

This says to match 2 to 7 spaces, but not if it's followed by a '>' that doesn't
have a '<' in front of it.  So then we'd have:

    this    is a test                # matched, no '>' comes after the spaces
    this    is <span>a test</span>   # matched, we find a '<' before coming to a '>'
    <span    id='xyz'>foo</span>     # not matched, a '>' is found after the spaces
                                         so, we're probably inside an HTML tag

Pm