From: Morgan <taria@...>
Date: 2005-09-02T05:32:01+09:00
Subject: Re: Still looking for a Ruby MUD client

Jacob Fugal wrote:
>A solution, similar to that employed by ncurses and many other UI
>systems, is to use the concept of an extended character. Each
>character in the string is flagged with applicable attributes.
>Translating marked up ASCII to a list of extended characters is easy
>enough: maintain a bitmask of attributes and turn them on/off as you
>encounter tags; apply the current bitmask to each character
>encountered.

Seems reasonable, but I do wonder how efficient the process would be.
Something like that on each character makes me nervous. `.`

>As an example application, your string would decode as follows:
>
>something = decode("A <C red>red</C> and <C blue>blue</C> baseball bat.")
># => A, ' ', r|red, e|red, d|red, ' ', a, n, d, ' ', b|blue, l|blue,
>u|blue, e|blue, ' ', b, a, s,  ...
>
>The regex /red and blue/ would match this substring
># r|red, e|red, d|red, ' ', a, n, d, ' ', b|blue, l|blue, u|blue, e|blue
>
>That substring is replaced with the substring (since it wasn't encoded):
># o, s, t, r, i, c, h

And then you'd get a bug report about how your replace is dropping color...

At least, the behavior I would expect is to preserve the existing coloration.
(Of course, then I specifically picked an example where there's no obvious
sensible way to do that. Still, I think keeping the color would generally be
expected.)

-Morgan 


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