It would aid your cause greatly if you were to show sample input as pasted into the form (say 3 lines max) and the equivalent desired HTML of that input once it has been transformed. At the moment everyone is left to guess what it is that you actually want to happen during this transformation.
When you have a moment, perhaps a read of How to ask better questions using Test::More and sample data will be of help.
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Here's a sample input. It is a copy and paste of a Word document:
This is a test posting.
• Hello there!
• How are you?
• Very well I hope!
This is the end of the posting.
As you can see, as entered here the dots are not indented as they were on the document copied. What I am looking for is a routine that will read the input and display it like this code would.
<p>This is a test posting.<ul><li>Hello there!</li><li>How are you?</li><li>Very well I hope!</li></ul>This is the end of the posting.</p>
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[d/l] |
I think your best bet is to officially declare that your application accepts Markdown format, and then add some tweaks for anything that Word produces which doesn't format the way you like. For instance, start with the CommonMark library, and if it doesn't like those bullet point characters in your example, you could write a quick search/replace of $text =~ s/\x{2022}/*/g; or whatever is required to make it valid Markdown.
I suggest Markdown because it's the most common rich-text-in-plain-text format on the Internet, and because there's no standard I'm aware of to receive MS Word formatting into a standard HTML form element. I expect there are custom MS extensions for Edge that can do it, but I don't have a desktop install of Word available to test with. Building on Markdown also helps with identifying indent levels of nested lists, which would be unreasonably hard to do with regexes.
There are also fully-featured javascript client-side rich text editors like CKEditor which you could integrate, and those will submit HTML to the back-end, no Perl translation required. They may have much better support for stuff pasted from Word, but some require a paid license for professional use, and you'd have to spend some time finding which one works the best for your use case.
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[d/l] |
use strict;
use warnings;
use utf8;
use Test::More tests => 1;
my $in = <<EOT;
This is a test posting.
• Hello there!
• How are you?
• Very well I hope!
This is the end of the posting.
EOT
my $want = '<p>This is a test posting.<ul><li>Hello there!</li><li>How
+ are you?</li><li>Very well I hope!</li></ul>This is the end of the p
+osting.</p>';
my $have = '<p>';
my $inlist = 0;
for (split /\n/, $in) {
if (s/•\s*/<li>/) {
$_ .= '</li>';
$_ = '<ul>' . $_ unless $inlist;
$inlist = 1;
} elsif ($inlist) {
$_ = '</ul>' . $_;
$inlist = 0;
}
$have .= $_;
}
$have .= '</p>';
is $have, $want;
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[d/l] |
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