At 03:22 PM 3/6/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>>This is an *incredibly* hard thing to do.
>
>True.
>
>The original idea of having a "ttlint" is a really cool one though. I wonder if
>there's a way to just re-purpose the parser somehow, or if this would need to be a
>separate one. It could be much slower and simpler than the real TT parser, if it's
>just looking for stuff like unclosed IF tags.
>
>- Perrin
I could see reporting all errors being difficult, but I think adding balanced tag
checking would not be too difficult.
I have not looked at all how the parsing is implemented for TT2, but I think even a
separate perl script that reads the templates and checks for and reports unbalanced
tags would not be too difficult. This is the case that I seem to spend the most time
debugging. Even if the template parser was not of any help in writing a ttlint, I was
thinking it might be possible to just convert the template into some form of overly
simplistic perl (basically perl for the control flow and print statements or strings
for everything else), then just run it through perl -w -c and use perl's built in
error checking. Use strict would probably have to be turned off to avoid having to
predeclare everything. Comments could be used to associate line numbers in perl with
line numbers in TT2. I realize that TT2's parser in effect already does this and much
more, but in some sense, the ttlint might need to be a little looser so that it could
process the whole file into perl without quitting, and it could afford to be looser
because it is doing only a static validation. Some things would be fatal to this type
of lint, like [% without %], but that could be checked and reported explicitly first
in a preprocessing step. Maybe I am oversimplifying the problem?
I.e. something like:
[% FOREACH item = list %]
<input name="[% item.name %]" ...>
[% END %]
could be turned into something like:
# line 1
foreach my $item (@list) {
print q[<input name="[% item.name %]">];
# line 3
}
so that if the [% END %] was missing, the } would be missing in perl.
Matthew Pressly
