I'm working on code to render HTML automatically from text files.

What I'd like is for a text file containing just linebreaks and some special characters to be rendered as HTML by some regexes.

I need to do three things:

  1. render some special-character shortcuts as bold and italic, i.e. in 
    this is
i italic
text

    [download]
    the line which starts with an i-space gets rendered as italics.

  2. I also need to do some multi-line ones, ( see 266313 ) to render lists.

  3. My final wish is to render the content, if it's not in one of those lists, into HTML-compliant paragraphs (at the moment it's just a bunch of text in a TD with double-BR-tags separating the "paragraphs").

So I can hack together regexes for each one of those, but I'm in TMTOWTDI mode at the moment, pondering various ways of doing it.

I could work on the lines of the text file as an array, I could put them together as one long string, or I could do a bit of both -- say do the single-line ones iterating over the string then join() and do the multi-line ones.

What do monks think?


“Every bit of code is either naturally related to the problem at hand, or else it's an accidental side effect of the fact that you happened to solve the problem using a digital computer.”
M-J D

In reply to AutoMagic HTML by Cody Pendant

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


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