From: Tobias Reif <tobiasreif@...>
Date: 2002-07-09T03:49:43+09:00
Subject: Re: is there a better string.each?

Tom Sawyer wrote:


> question: how do you determine paragraph seperation?


To delimit paragraphs, sections, headers, footers, etc, one uses 
specific formats and tools.

Yes you can have some tool guess what your idea of a paragraph in a 
plain text file is, but this will not get you very far; it will be very 
simple (text2html style). If you provide lots of features, then parsing 
gets difficult.
There is no way to correctly guess the structure of arbitrary text 
files; you'd have to develop a format that authors use; but you're much 
better off using popular notational systems such as XML, and you might 
want to evaluate document markup languages such as XHTML and DocBook. 
Then you can choose from a myriad of available tools, and there will be 
no guesswork.


Tobi

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