On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Robert Klemme <shortcutter / googlemail.com> wrote: > On 20 Jun., 16:29, Robert Dober <robert.do... / gmail.com> wrote: >> Thank you both for your input, it showed me that in matter of fact my >> concern about flexibility of the approach was a sign of misconception. >> >> What I really want to provide is not a framework but a toolset, I just >> shall not care about how it is called, it shall just deliver a maximum >> of value for a certain job to do, which happens to be text processing >> (just short of parsing, I guess). >> >> My main problem however is to decide what I want to be done by >> filtering text and what I want to be done by DSL-like template code >> and how to make the two approaches work together. >> >> I guess I am off to the design board again, some rapid prototyping >> might help too. > > Are there any particularities about the kind of text processing that > you intend? I can imagine a lot of different things from line based > conversions and filtering, over regular expression manipulation to > parsing of context free (or even sensitive) grammars. > > You might actually discover that the toolset you have in mind is > actually Ruby's standard library because your requirements / > processing options are too different. > > Kind regards > > robert > > Robert you just gave me the "simple" answer to what I really want, and you are absolutely right it is almost pure Ruby as it turns out to be a DSL. Here is a simple example html do body do headline :level => 1, :text => "The Ultimate Solution To All Problems AKA 42" table :headers => true, :text => <<-EOT ### And this is the point I missed until I tried to answer your mail :) number meaning 1 one 42 yes EOT table :from_file => "some_cvs_file", :format => :cvs etc.etc. and now I have just to write lots of tests and do uninteresting work like implementing them ;) But I guess it will not be worth a project anymore, so many have written that kind of DSL already. And IIRC something like above is already implemented somewhere? Cheers Robert -- http://ruby-smalltalk.blogspot.com/ --- Les móÎes questions qu'on se pose On part vers oet vers qui Et comme indice pas grand-chose Des roses et des orties. - Francis Cabrel