From: why the lucky stiff <ruby-talk@...>
Date: 2004-04-10T00:13:01+09:00
Subject: Re: RedCloth bug and suggestion

Jim Menard wrote:

> 
>     bq. -- some text
> 
> turns into
> 
>     <p>bq.&#8212;some text</p>
> 

The rule was: if an em-dash '--' is surrounded by spaces, the spaces get 
stripped, so the dash can snug up against the words it's near.

But, in the case of a period, I think we should keep the space.  So the 
above should work now and sentences which start with an em-dash should 
be easier to look on.

> It looks like RedCloth is following the Textile "spec" (though I can't 
> find one anywhere). Is anyone else surprised by this output?

The spec is the PHP source code, the regexps.

> Also, I'd like to know if Textile is supposed to preserve newlines. When 
> I have text like
> 
>     A paragraph that spans
>     multiple lines.
> 
> it gets translated to
> 
>     <p>A paragraph that spans<br />
>     multiple lines.</p>
> 
> when what I would *like* is
> 
>     <p>A paragraph that spans
>     multiple lines.</p>
> 
> Is there a setting I can change so that more than one newline starts a 
> new paragraph but a single newline does not?

No.  Personally, I use YAML to handle the folding of my text.  So the 
above could be stored in my YAML:

    --- >
    A paragraph that spans
    multiple lines.

Then, RedCloth.new( YAML::load( above_string ) ).to_html.

So, if you like, I could strip the folding code out of the old YAML.rb 
and use it in RedCloth.

_why