[pmwiki-users] Three column text

[Steve Glover]

Hi,

Recently someone was looking for a way of splitting a long table into
columns.

Ben Wilson's column recipe does this for two columns - nesting tables
aren't a problem when you put double-pipe markup tables inside the
pmwiki markup sort.

The recipe also lends itself to stretching:

Markup('columns', '_begin',
    '/(.*?)\(:col1:\)(.*?)\(:col2:\)(.*)$/se',
    "stripslashes(Columnize('$1', '$2','$3'))");

function Columnize($one, $two, $three) {
  $bits = preg_split("/\(:colstart:\)/", $one);
  list($pre, $one) = (count($bits) > 1) ? $bits : array('', $bits[0]);
  $bits = preg_split("/\(:colend:\)/", $three);
  list($three, $post) = (count($bits) > 1) ? $bits : array($bits[0],'');

  return<<<RETURN
$pre
(:table class=columns border=0 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=6:)
(:cellnr valign=top width=33%:)
|| class="zebra" border=1 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=4
||!Member Organisation ||!IdPs||!SPs||
$one
(:cell valign=top width=33%:)
|| class="zebra" border=1 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=4
||!Member Organisation ||!IdPs||!SPs||
$two
(:cell valign=top width=33%:)
|| class="zebra" border=1 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=4
||!Member Organisation ||!IdPs||!SPs||
$three
(:tableend:)
$post
RETURN;
}

Okay, there's stuff I've done there that's Bad and Wrong: the table
headers should be in page markup, not in the recipe, for one. And for
another, rather than doing a "cargo cult" copy of Ben's code I should be
counting the lines in the original content between colstart and colend,
and splitting them at n/3 and 2n/3.

But in case it's of use to anyone, there you go....

Steve


-- 
Steve Glover at                          email: steve at fell-services.net
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