Anyway, writing this static site generator from scratch is also the perfect excuse to explore a not so widely know technology to manipulate text files.
AWK, from the intials of its creator, is an old an powerful text file maniulation. Syntactically close to C, it is a scripting language to manipulation text entries.
-Its [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AWK) sums up nicely its story.
+Its wikipedia page sums up nicely its story.
I thought it was clever to use is for a site generator, to parse markdown files and generate html ones.
-However, according to this [listing](https://jamstack.org/generators/) of static site generator programs, another one has had the same idea.
-Hence, the following, as well as my code is heavily inspired by [Zodiac](https://github.com/nuex/zodiac) (even though the repo has not been touched for 8years).
+However, according to this listing of static site generator programs, another one has had the same idea.
+Hence, the following, as well as my code is heavily inspired by Zodiac (even though the repo has not been touched for 8 years).
Following the official [syntax](https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax), is a good start for a parser.
+Following the official syntax, is a good start for a parser.
AWK works as follow : it takes an optional regex and execute some code between bracket, as a function, at each line of the text input.
For example :
/^#/ {
@@ -44,10 +44,10 @@
}
In the example above, as per the [documentation](https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/String-Functions.html#index-substr_0028_0029-function)
+In the example above, as per the documentation
it returns the subtring of `$0` starting at 3 (1 being `#` and 2 the whitespace following it) to the end of the line.
Now this is better, but we now are able to generalized it to all headers. Another function, `match` can return the number of char matched by a regex,
-and allows the script to dynamically determine which depth of header it parses :
+and allows the script to dynamically determine which depth of header it parses. This length is stored is the global variable `RLENGTH`:
/^#+ / {
match($0, /#+ /);
n = RLENGTH;
@@ -147,12 +147,10 @@ function last() {
This way we are able to simply parse markdown and turn it into an HTML file.
Of course I am aware that is lacks emphasis, strong and code within a line of text.
However I did implement it, but maybe it will be explained in another edit of this post.
-Nonetheless the code can still be consulted on [github](https://github.com/SiwonP/bob).
-A testing suite for markdown parser
-Having a markdown parser is cool, having one well tested id better.
-I embarked in writing a testing suite for markdown parsers. I wanted it to be generic, meaning you only had to provide a parsing program,
-that takes markdown in the standard input, and returns html in the standard output.
-All tests would be provided by the test suite.
+Nonetheless the code can still be consulted on github.
+Parsing in-line fonctionnalities
+For now we have seen a way to parse blocks, but markdown also handles strong, emphasis and links. However, these tags can appear anywhere in a line.
+Hence we need to be able to parse these lines apart from the block itself : indeed a header can container a strong and a link.