I'm writing a long HOWTO in reStructuredText format and wondering if there's a way to let user specify values for a couple variables (hostname, ip address) at the top so the rest of the document would be filled with those automatically?
Like me, you are probably looking for substitution. At the bottom of the section you'll find how to replace text.
Substitution Definitions
Doctree element: substitution_definition.
Substitution definitions are indicated by an explicit markup start
(".. ") followed by a vertical bar, the substitution text, another
vertical bar, whitespace, and the definition block. Substitution text
may not begin or end with whitespace. A substitution definition block
contains an embedded inline-compatible directive (without the leading
".. "), such as "image" or "replace".
Specifically about text replacement:
Replacement text
The substitution mechanism may be used for simple macro substitution. This may be appropriate when the replacement text is
repeated many times throughout one or more documents, especially if it
may need to change later. A short example is unavoidably contrived:
|RST|_ is a little annoying to type over and over, especially
when writing about |RST| itself, and spelling out the
bicapitalized word |RST| every time isn't really necessary for
|RST| source readability.
.. |RST| replace:: reStructuredText
.. _RST: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
reStructuredText is a markup language to define static content. HTML content (I assumed the desired output format is HTML) is typically generated from reStructuredText on build time and then released/shipped to the user.
To allow users to specify variables, you would need a solution on top of reStructuredText, for example:
Ship the content with a JavaScript plugin that dynamically replaces specific strings in the HTML document with user input.
Generate the documentation on-the-fly after the user has specified the variables.
Note that these examples are not necessarily particularly viable solutions.
Is there a way to put a portion of raw text data or a text file inside a django template in a way that will preserve its basic formatting (line breaks and tabulation)?
<PRE> does the job good enough:
HTML tag <PRE> will output anything that's enclosed preserving line breaks and spaces. This HTML element is supported by most widely browsers and both HTML4 and HTML5.
I often grab quotes from articles that include citations that include superscripted footnotes, which when copied are a pain in the ass. They show up as actual letters in the text as they are pasted in plaintext and not in html.
Is there a way I could run this through a regex to take out these superscripts?
For example
In the abeginning bGod ccreated the dheaven and the eearth.
Should become
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
I can't think of a way to have regex search for misspellings and a corresponding sequential set of numbers and letters.
Any thoughts? I'm also using Sublime Text 3 for the majority of my writing, but I wouldn't mind outsourcing this to an AppleScript, or text replacement app (aText, textExpander, etc.).
Matching Code vs. Matching a Screen
It's hard to tell without seeing an example, but this should be doable if you copy the text from code view, as opposed to the regular browser view. (Ctrl or Cmd-J is your friend). Since writing the rules will take time, this will only be worthwhile for large chunks of text.
In code view, your superscript will be marked up in a way that can be targetted by regex. For instance:
and therefore bananas make you smartera
in the browser view (where the a at the end is a citation note) may look like this in code view:
and therefore bananas make you smarter<span class="mycitations">a</span>
In your editor, using regex, you can process the text to remove all tags, or just certain tags. The rules may not always be easy to write, and of course there are many disclaimers about using regex to parse html.
However, if your source is always the same (Wikipedia for instance), then you can create and save rules that should work across many pages.
I am using tinyxml to save input from a text ctrl. The user can copy whatever they like into the text box and it gets written to an xml file. I'm finding that the new lines don't get saved and neither do & characters. The weird part is that tinyxml just discards them completely without any warning. If I put a & into the textbox and save, the tag will look like:
<textboxtext></textboxtext>
newlines completely disappear as well. No characters whatsoever are stored. What's going on? Even if I need to escape them with & or something, why does it just discard everything? Also, I can't find anything on google regarding this topic. Any help?
EDIT:
I found this topic which suggest the discarding of these characters may be a bug.
TinyXML and preserving HTML Entities
It is, apparently, a bug in TinyXml.
The simple workaround is to escape anything that it might not like:
&, ", ', < and > got their regular xml entities encoding
strange characters (read non-alphanumerical / regular punctuation) are best translated to their unicode codepoint: &#....;
Remember that TinyXml is before all a lightweight xml library, not a full-fledged beast.
I recently discussed editors with a co-worker. He uses one of the less popular editors and I use another (I won't say which ones since it's not relevant and I want to avoid an editor flame war). I was saying that I didn't like his editor as much because it doesn't let you do find/replace with regular expressions.
He said he's never wanted to do that, which was surprising since it's something I find myself doing all the time. However, off the top of my head I wasn't able to come up with more than one or two examples. Can anyone here offer some examples of times when they've found regex find/replace useful in their editor? Here's what I've been able to come up with since then as examples of things that I've actually had to do:
Strip the beginning of a line off of every line in a file that looks like:
Line 25634 :
Line 632157 :
Taking a few dozen files with a standard header which is slightly different for each file and stripping the first 19 lines from all of them all at once.
Piping the result of a MySQL select statement into a text file, then removing all of the formatting junk and reformatting it as a Python dictionary for use in a simple script.
In a CSV file with no escaped commas, replace the first character of the 8th column of each row with a capital A.
Given a bunch of GDB stack traces with lines like
#3 0x080a6d61 in _mvl_set_req_done (req=0x82624a4, result=27158) at ../../mvl/src/mvl_serv.c:850
strip out everything from each line except the function names.
Does anyone else have any real-life examples? The next time this comes up, I'd like to be more prepared to list good examples of why this feature is useful.
Just last week, I used regex find/replace to convert a CSV file to an XML file.
Simple enough to do really, just chop up each field (luckily it didn't have any escaped commas) and push it back out with the appropriate tags in place of the commas.
Regex make it easy to replace whole words using word boundaries.
(\b\w+\b)
So you can replace unwanted words in your file without disturbing words like Scunthorpe
Yesterday I took a create table statement I made for an Oracle table and converted the fields to setString() method calls using JDBC and PreparedStatements. The table's field names were mapped to my class properties, so regex search and replace was the perfect fit.
Create Table text:
...
field_1 VARCHAR2(100) NULL,
field_2 VARCHAR2(10) NULL,
field_3 NUMBER(8) NULL,
field_4 VARCHAR2(100) NULL,
....
My Regex Search:
/([a-z_])+ .*?,?/
My Replacement:
pstmt.setString(1, \1);
The result:
...
pstmt.setString(1, field_1);
pstmt.setString(1, field_2);
pstmt.setString(1, field_3);
pstmt.setString(1, field_4);
....
I then went through and manually set the position int for each call and changed the method to setInt() (and others) where necessary, but that worked handy for me. I actually used it three or four times for similar field to method call conversions.
I like to use regexps to reformat lists of items like this:
int item1
double item2
to
public void item1(int item1){
}
public void item2(double item2){
}
This can be a big time saver.
I use it all the time when someone sends me a list of patient visit numbers in a column (say 100-200) and I need them in a '0000000444','000000004445' format. works wonders for me!
I also use it to pull out email addresses in an email. I send out group emails often and all the bounced returns come back in one email. So, I regex to pull them all out and then drop them into a string var to remove from the database.
I even wrote a little dialog prog to apply regex to my clipboard. It grabs the contents applies the regex and then loads it back into the clipboard.
One thing I use it for in web development all the time is stripping some text of its HTML tags. This might need to be done to sanitize user input for security, or for displaying a preview of a news article. For example, if you have an article with lots of HTML tags for formatting, you can't just do LEFT(article_text,100) + '...' (plus a "read more" link) and render that on a page at the risk of breaking the page by splitting apart an HTML tag.
Also, I've had to strip img tags in database records that link to images that no longer exist. And let's not forget web form validation. If you want to make a user has entered a correct email address (syntactically speaking) into a web form this is about the only way of checking it thoroughly.
I've just pasted a long character sequence into a string literal, and now I want to break it up into a concatenation of shorter string literals so it doesn't wrap. I also want it to be readable, so I want to break only after spaces. I select the whole string (minus the quotation marks) and do an in-selection-only replace-all with this regex:
/.{20,60} /
...and this replacement:
/$0"ΒΆ + "/
...where the pilcrow is an actual newline, and the number of spaces varies from one incident to the next. Result:
String s = "I recently discussed editors with a co-worker. He uses one "
+ "of the less popular editors and I use another (I won't say "
+ "which ones since it's not relevant and I want to avoid an "
+ "editor flame war). I was saying that I didn't like his "
+ "editor as much because it doesn't let you do find/replace "
+ "with regular expressions.";
The first thing I do with any editor is try to figure out it's Regex oddities. I use it all the time. Nothing really crazy, but it's handy when you've got to copy/paste stuff between different types of text - SQL <-> PHP is the one I do most often - and you don't want to fart around making the same change 500 times.
Regex is very handy any time I am trying to replace a value that spans multiple lines. Or when I want to replace a value with something that contains a line break.
I also like that you can match things in a regular expression and not replace the full match using the $# syntax to output the portion of the match you want to maintain.
I agree with you on points 3, 4, and 5 but not necessarily points 1 and 2.
In some cases 1 and 2 are easier to achieve using a anonymous keyboard macro.
By this I mean doing the following:
Position the cursor on the first line
Start a keyboard macro recording
Modify the first line
Position the cursor on the next line
Stop record.
Now all that is needed to modify the next line is to repeat the macro.
I could live with out support for regex but could not live without anonymous keyboard macros.