From: "Sean O'Dell" <sean@...[REMOVE_THE_SPAM]>
Date: 2003-09-09T06:59:48+09:00
Subject: Re: ANN: MetaTags 1.0

Ryan Pavlik wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Sep 2003 04:59:32 +0900
> "Sean O'Dell" <sean@cSePlsoAfMt.com [REMOVE_THE_SPAM]> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Ryan, for what it's worth, I like this pretty much how it works right 
>>now.  If I were to change anything it would be:
> 
> 
> Thanks... feedback is good.
> 
> 
>>Make it so "!" is re-definable and ignore any text that appears before 
>>it.  This could be used as a generic source code parser which extracts 
>>documentation, etc. from the source code (by parsing anything after a 
>>comment character + a semaphor).  As a stand-alone library, that could 
>>have lots of other uses.
> 
> 
> I'll definitely include this in the next release... probably on both a
> global and a per-TagSet basis.  Basically, it just splits the string on
> a regexp, and the regexp is currently /^\s*!(\w+):?/.  I just picked !
> because I believe javadoc and doxygen use it, so it might be familiar.
> 
> In the next release I'll also try to include a basic tool that generates
> HTML as an example.  This wasn't my primary goal, but it'd probably be
> useful.

Or just dump it as XML and let people worry about transforming it into 
HTML themselves.  Generating XML is pretty simple; you just bracket 
stuff by name and transform &, ', ", < and > character.  That part is just:

class String
   def escape_xml()
     result = self.clone
     result.gsub!(/[&'"<>]/) do | m |
       case m
         when "&"
           "&amp;"
         when "'"
           "&apos;"
         when "\""
           "&quit;"
         when "<"
           "&lt;"
         when ">"
           "&gt;"
       end
     end
   end
end

.... or perhaps someone knows a Rubyism that would be more efficient.

	Sean O'Dell