* * * * *

                   & … or something like that …

I made some more tweaks to the demo program; it now supports a “mixed” mode—
you can type in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags, but the system will
add <P> tags if you leave a blank line between paragraphs (in fact, it was
only five lines of C code—easier than I thought).

There's still one bug and it has to deal with HTML entity encoding (and
mostly with populating the <TEXTAREA> with the text that was submitted). Type
“&amp;” (which is the HTML entity for a lone “&”) then submit the data. The
<TEXTAREA> will come back with a lone “&” where you typed “&amp;” before.
Basically, to display “&amp;” you need to display “&amp;amp;” (and to display
that I had to type “&amp;amp;amp;”—I think I got the right number of
“amp;s”).

Ow—my brain hurts (and if the above is incorrect, I'm not bothering to fix it
which goes to show you how nasty this little problem is).

Oh, the demo program—it also supports a few shortcuts, like “---” (three
dashes in a row) will be converted to “—” (the em-dash, and the code that
processes entries for this blog will do the same, so check the source if you
want to see how I got around that—geeze, this sef-referential stuff will kill
me!) and “...” (three periods) will be converted to “…” (elipsis—it's own
character); some short-cuts like that (and these shortcuts happen in any of
the modes by the way).

Okay, I'm going to lie down now.

Update on Wednesday, April 13^th, 2022

The demo program has long since been deleted. This entry can be safely
ignored.



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