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From: mooring@grimoire.uucp (Ed Mooring)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Challenge: Generalized automatic numbering
Message-ID: <129@tymix.Tymnet.COM>
Date: 7 Feb 91 20:16:15 GMT
References: <9917@pitt.UUCP>
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Reply-To: mooring@grimoire.tymnet.com (Ed Mooring)
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In article <9917@pitt.UUCP> al@ee.pitt.edu (A. Martello) writes:
>I wrote the man page, who's going write the perl "one-liner"?  (just
>kidding) Anyway, I am looking for some perl code to perform the
>following.  Anyone have anything lying around that comes close (or
>feel like hacking it together)?
>
>It is likely that there are ambiguities and errors in the description
>below.
	[self-characterization deleted]
>How about a perl script to scan an input file and replace occurrences
>of a 'special char' with a number.  Simple enough?  How about being
>able to have "nested" numbers (like you'd use in an outline).
>
	[specification removed for brevity's sake]

This isn't quite what you asked for, but close.  I needed a crude text
formatter for a bunch of people using different machines, with no time 
to train them to use a real formatter, so I put this together.

The style and technique are amateurish because it's the very first perl
program I ever wrote, two days after I brought up version 2.0, I 
promise I'd do better now :-)

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
#
#  Quick perl script to replace commands of the form
#  @L# with the pseudo mil-spec section numbering form.
#
#  Added @LB	to begin a list
#	 @LI	to insert a list item (#.)
#        @LE    to end a list
$ListLevel = -1;
while (<>) {
	if (($Spaces, $Level, $Etc) = /^(\s*)@L(\d+)(.*)/) {
		die "That's not a level!" unless (length($Level));
		$Level -= 1;			# make up for 0 starting arrays
		for ($i = $Level+1; $i <= $#depth; $i++) {
			@depth[$i]=0;
		}
		@depth[$Level] += 1;
		$#depth = $Level;
		print $Spaces, join ('.',@depth),$Etc, "\n";
		die "Unterminated list" unless ($ListLevel == -1);
	}
	elsif (/@LB/) { # start a list
		die "Nested lists are not allowed" unless ($ListLevel == -1);
		$ListLevel = 0;
	}
	elsif (($spaces, $rest) = /^(\s*)@LI(.*)/) { # list item
		$ListLevel += 1;
		die "List item not between @LB and @LE " unless ($ListLevel > 0);
		print $spaces,$ListLevel,".",$rest,"\n";
	}
	elsif (/@LE/) { #end a list
		die "List ended without having begun" unless ($ListLevel >= 0);
		$ListLevel = -1;
	}
	else {
		print;
	}
}
exit 0;
----------
Ed Mooring (mooring@grimoire.tymnet.com 408-999-7504)