I have the misfortune of being stuck programming in a very bad
scripting language that has poor support for functions, variable
substitutions, loops, etc. etc. (It's a proprietary language called
Aegis scripting language, for scripting NPCs in a game.)
I've been using Ruby as a macro pre-processor so that I can write more
maintainable scripts without violating the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
principle. Presently, I have the following functionality:
1. #{...} strings are evaluated by Ruby
2. lines starting with @ are evaluated by Ruby
Thanks to Ruby's power and simplicity, the ENTIRE pre-processor is
just these few lines:
while line = gets
line.chomp!
if line =~ /^\s*\@(.*)$/
# Line starts with a @; it is Ruby code
puts $1
else
# Line should be printed, with #{} substitution
available
puts "puts \"#{line.gsub('"', '\"')}\""
end
end
Now my question is, am I reinventing the wheel here in that
pre-processor code I wrote---is there already an existing module in
the RAA that does this? I didn't want to use ERuby because I find that
those <% %> <%= %> tags everywhere make the script unreadable (ERuby
is more for HTML IMO).
Are you aware that you can set ERuby (and ERb, the little brother library included standard with Ruby) to treat any line beginning with a simple % as code?
Example:
% npcs.each do |thug|
The thug's name is: <%= thug.name %>
% end
Just wanted to point that out. It's covered in the documentation for the library, if you want to learn more.
James Edward Gray II
···
On Sep 9, 2005, at 7:11 PM, debbie@theanimaro.com wrote:
I didn't want to use ERuby because I find that
those <% %> <%= %> tags everywhere make the script unreadable (ERuby
is more for HTML IMO).
I've been using Ruby as a macro pre-processor so that I can write more
maintainable scripts without violating the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
principle. Presently, I have the following functionality:
1. #{...} strings are evaluated by Ruby
2. lines starting with @ are evaluated by Ruby
Thanks to Ruby's power and simplicity, the ENTIRE pre-processor is
just these few lines:
while line = gets
line.chomp!
if line =~ /^\s*\@(.*)$/
# Line starts with a @; it is Ruby code
puts $1
else
# Line should be printed, with #{} substitution
available
puts "puts \"#{line.gsub('"', '\"')}\""
end
end
Looks like your template's distilled your business logic pretty well,
but maybe you can locate a copy of Herrington's book on eRB for code
generation. i've seen it at Borders in the past (doesn't talk about
avoiding the '<%' '%>' and '<%' '=%>', except to say that you can use
'<%%' etc for ASP, JSP.) Actually, i find that if those tags aren't
set off by themselves and surrounded by blank lines, they're hard to
pick out of HTML templates.
I have the misfortune of being stuck programming in a very bad
scripting language that has poor support for functions, variable
substitutions, loops, etc. etc. (It's a proprietary language called
Aegis scripting language, for scripting NPCs in a game.)
I've been using Ruby as a macro pre-processor so that I can write more
maintainable scripts without violating the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)
principle. Presently, I have the following functionality:
1. #{...} strings are evaluated by Ruby
2. lines starting with @ are evaluated by Ruby
Thanks to Ruby's power and simplicity, the ENTIRE pre-processor is
just these few lines:
while line = gets
line.chomp!
if line =~ /^\s*\@(.*)$/
# Line starts with a @; it is Ruby code
puts $1
else
# Line should be printed, with #{} substitution
available
puts "puts \"#{line.gsub('"', '\"')}\""
end
end
Now my question is, am I reinventing the wheel here in that
pre-processor code I wrote---is there already an existing module in
the RAA that does this? I didn't want to use ERuby because I find that
those <% %> <%= %> tags everywhere make the script unreadable (ERuby
is more for HTML IMO).
Are you aware that you can set ERuby (and ERb, the little brother library included standard with Ruby) to treat any line beginning with a simple % as code?
And further, than you don't have to use <%=...%> if you don't want:
Example:
% npcs.each do |thug|
The thug's name is: <%= thug.name %>
% end
% nps.each do |thug|
% _erbout << "The thug's name is: #{thug.name}"
% end
···
On Sep 9, 2005, at 6:21 PM, James Edward Gray II wrote:
There is if you have any literal text in your ERB file. (And if you don't have ANY literal text, then there's not much point in using ERB, is there?) For example:
require 'erb'
template1 = <<'ENDTEMPLATE'
Hello
% puts "you crazy"
World
ENDTEMPLATE
ERB.new( template1, nil, '%' ).run
#=> you crazy
#=> Hello
#=> World
Yes there is. A call to puts() would be resolved when it is interpreted, while the rest of the template output would come out once the whole thing has been generated. The output would be out of order. Avoid puts() in ERb, or use the patch floating around that makes it work as expected there.
James Edward Gray II
···
On Sep 10, 2005, at 4:26 AM, Malte Milatz wrote:
Gavin Kistner wrote:
[erb]
% nps.each do |thug|
% _erbout << "The thug's name is: #{thug.name}"
% end
Furthermore, if erb is supposed to send its output to STDOUT, there's no
problem to simply use "puts" here.
