Re: Transforming strange format to XML

I don't recognize the format either, so I'll just provide a substitution to transform the cell tags in a line, according to your example. s,\[_CELL_\]\s*(.*?)\s*?(?=\[_CELL_\]|$),<CELL>$1</CELL>,g; This matches from an opening [_CELL_] up to the next opening [_CELL_] or the end of the line, and sticks in the opening and closing <CELL> tags, swallowing any leading and trailing whitespace.

This substitution may need to be adjusted based on the details of the actual format.

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Re: Re: Transforming strange format to XML by Tortue (Scribe) on Nov 18, 2001 at 00:04 UTC
I obviously hadn't quite mastered combining positive lookahead and non-greediness (selflessness?) yet. Until now my solution was to use two statements: `s{\[_(CELL\|COLHEAD)_\] (.)}{<$1>$2</$1>}g; s{\s\[_(CELL\|COLHEAD)_\]\s}{</$1><$1>}g;` [download] Here it's more complicated because there's several of these tags. It's lamer and slower than yours, so I'll gladly change it, thanks! Pauses to think for a while...* Hm, with that extra twist I just introduced (not fair, I know), maybe the two-step version isn't slower. Lookahead on something it doesn't know yet could get tricky, maybe. `s,\[_(CELL\|COLHEAD)_\]\s(.?)\s*?(?=\[_\1_\]\|$),<$1>$2</$1>,g;` But it seems to work fine, and I don't think I care about speed anyway.	[reply] [d/l] [select]

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Re: Re: Transforming strange format to XML
by Tortue (Scribe) on Nov 18, 2001 at 00:04 UTC

    s{\[_(CELL|COLHEAD)_\] (.*)}{<$1>$2</$1>}g;
    s{\s*\[_(CELL|COLHEAD)_\]\s*}{</$1><$1>}g;
[download]

Pauses to think for a while... Hm, with that extra twist I just introduced (not fair, I know), maybe the two-step version isn't slower. Lookahead on something it doesn't know yet could get tricky, maybe.

    s,\[_(CELL|COLHEAD)_\]\s*(.*?)\s*?(?=\[_\1_\]|$),<$1>$2</$1>,g;

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