Re: [Groff] Tabular html output.

[Heinz-Jürgen Oertel]

Am Freitag, 21. Mai 2004 19:58 schrieb Larry Kollar:

>
> Sure. I just shook out a serious bug, so here's a copy that works with
> the attached test file. :-) Use a pipe like this to build HTML:
>
>       awk -f htbl.awk test.ms | groff -Thtml -ms >test.html
>
> I hope this inspires some hacking among awk and other experts here....

Hello Larry, thanks, I think this is a good starting point, besides awk is a 
strange language. These days I would prefer using Tcl, but anyway, these are 
only personal preferences.
I got simple tables working.
We often are using '#'  as a table separator. Here the script the fist time 
did something wrong with interpreting the line
tab(#);
in your code, the line:
 sub( /tab *\(([^)]*)\)/, "\1", ts ); # get parameter for tab
should extract the separator. It didn't with my example.
That leads to the question which awk are you using ?
from the gawk Manual (http://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/):
---------
 gensub provides an additional feature
 that is not available in sub or gsub:
 the ability to specify components of a regexp
 in the replacement text.
 This is done by using parentheses in the regexp
 to mark the components
 and then specifying \N in the replacement text,
 where N is a digit from 1 to 9.
--------------
So I had to change this line to:
ts = gensub(/.*tab *\((.*)\).*/, "\\1", 1, $0)
Now it works fine.

Question to the list. Is this discussion, improving Larry's script, OT?

Regards
  Heinz