Re: Need guidance on scripting program code into FrameMaker

["Sandy Harris" <sharris -at- dkl -dot- com>]

"Guy K. Haas" wrote:
> 
> O TECHWR-L gurus--
> 
> I'm working in a WinNT environment.
> 
> I have a corpus of code chunks that I want to import into a
> FrameMaker doc -- a reference manual about an API.
> 
> These chunks are sample/example code, and the developers are
> fiddling with them actively.  I want to be able to snatch them
> up and publish them every few weeks without a lot of handwork.
> 
> What kind of handwork?
> 
> I want to
> -replace any initial tabs with a set of 4 spaces, then
>    replace any set of 4 initial spaces with a tab,
> -omit lines that contain a certain text

I'd do those with the standard-since-the-70s Unix tool 'sed',
the stream editor. Both are one-line sed commands. Put the
commands in a file, and do:

sed -f sedscript < inputfile > outputfile

You can do much fancier things with sed, and even more with
the 'awk' text processing programming language. O'Reilly
publish a good book on those tools, by Dougherty.

There are a full set of free Unix tools for 95/98/NT at:

http://www.cygnus.com/cygwin/

but I'd suggest you just ask if your developers can grab
sed source from the nearest Linux box and compile it for
you on NT.

I don't know Perl, but it is supposed to do eveything awk
and sed can.

> -have each file come in as a single FrameMaker paragraph,
>       not a paragraph per incoming line.

> ... when I
> use Perl to replace the "newline" or even "\0D\0A" (CR/LF)
> with a \f (formfeed) or \r (return), and use the first option,
> I still get one paragraph per line when I import.
> 
Try \n for newline. Unix term for linefeed. DOS/Windoze lines
end with CR LF, Unix with LF only and I think Mac is CR only.

If I remember right,