On 11/12/07, Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com wrote:
Could you each please post your personal favorite hobby-horse counter case which you feel would make parsing these constructs difficult so we can all pick it apart?
IMHO it's utter madness to replace one set of ambigous, difficult-to-parse formatting markers with a different set of ambiguous, difficult-to-parse formatting markers.
"Jet* is an Australian airline. Jet* was founded in 2000 as a spin-off of Qantas."
"The biggest problems are bold and/or italics, and parsing and/or regular expressions".
"files are most often written to the /etc or /bin directories"
"The sounds /z/ and /s/ are distinct phonemes in English, but allophones in Spanish."
"Quasi-emoticons like *smiles* and *hugs* are used to..."
I think even if you can make rules that can tell them apart, you're adding unnecessary complexity both to the parser and to the user. Compare:
1) All text between ** and ** is shown in bold. 2) All text between * and * is shown in bold. Except if the first * is at the start of the line, in which case it's a list. Or if the * is in the middle of a word, in which case it's shown literally. Of course, if you actually do want bold in the middle of a word, do X...
Actually there's a flaw here: ** at the start of a line is going to be ambiguous as well. Bugger.
Strangely enough, with my 2 line hack to parser.php, the current text renders exactly correctly:
**Melbourne** is a great city.
**This is a list.
So again: is "turning bold and italics off between two alphanumeric characters" a thing which actually *happens*, much?
Dunno. My parents' company used to be spelt with the first part of the word in bold and the second part in italics, no space in between. There are bound to be a few techie companies spelt like that.
Steve