I just experimented with a battery of macros (json.ddoc) for generating
json via ddoc. Results for std.algorithm are in
http://paste.ofcode.org/DFnxChvmRGJiXYpYYk2XWr.
There are a couple of things that make the generated json invalid:
1. I couldn't get escaping to work. My ESCAPES is:
ESCAPES=/\/\\/ /"/\"/ /&/&/ /</</ />/>/
So single backslashes will be doubled and quotes will be backslashed.
Nice. The trouble is, escaping only does its job sometimes but not
always. I haven't yet figured the circumstances.
2. This was mentioned before - paragraph, whitespace and especially
newline handling are handled rather poorly in ddoc. The generated json
is full of newlines in the middle of strings, which are invalid in json
(\n must be used). I think every paragraph should be enclosed in a
$(DDOC_PARAGRAPH) macros that has single newlines replaced with spaces.
Alternatively, a built-in macro could escape strings appropriately.
3. Some descriptions feature multiple examples, leading to duplicate
"DDOC_EXAMPLES" keys. Json strongly discourages (at least) duplicate
keys in objects. There is no way to have some autoincrement thing that
generates "DDOC_EXAMPLES_1", "DDOC_EXAMPLES_2" etc. It could be argued
that that's an issue with the source, not the generator.
That said, this is pretty much it. No other major impediments seem to
stop the show. Thoughts and ideas on how to get this to work?
Andrei
