• Do not register here on develop.twiki.org, login with your twiki.org account.
• Use View topic Item7848 for generic doc work for TWiki-6.1.1. Use View topic Item7851 for doc work on extensions that are not part of a release. More... Close
• Anything you create or change in standard webs (Main, TWiki, Sandbox etc) will be automatically reverted on every SVN update.
Does this site look broken?. Use the LitterTray web for test cases.

If you define a tag with registerTagHandler, if this tag returns a string that looks like a tag, then the leading and trailing percent character is chopped off after TWiki::_processTags.


Tag handlers are really designed for applications where the content of the tag is fully evaluated before return. The parser would be horrendously inefficient otherwise (not that it's exactly super fast already....) -- CC

Say you have

sub myTag {
   return '%YOURTAG{value="Have a nice day"}%';
}

From a user perspective, it appears that the two following constructs should behave the same way:

sub commonTagsHandler {
   $_[0] =~ s/%MYTAG({.*)}?%/&myTag()/geo;
}
and
TWiki::Func::registerTagsHandler( 'MYTAG', \&myTag );

but they are not:

  • The first variant returns %YOURTAG{value="Have a nice day"}%
  • The second variant returns YOURTAG{value="Have a nice day"}

I don't quite understand why there would be a problem. Obviously, myTag would have to be careful not to return a tag that would get recursively evaluated over and over again. But certainly, that is the responsibility of the plugin writer, not the system.

Can you give an example where we could get into an infinite loop that would not be due to carelessness of the plugin writer. And if you want to protect against that, why do we allow this in commonTagsHandler? Or the other handlers?

I think this is a needless inconsistency and forces people to use commonTagsHandler where they could use registered tags (which I believe are more efficient). -- TW


It's not a question of an infinite loop, so much as a question of parser efficiency. At the moment the parser is sort-of recursive descent - at least evaluation is inside-out-left-right. It is assumed that an inner tag will be fully expanded before the final text is placed in context of the outer tag. If you don't make this assumption, you end up with the situation where an inner tag can return a result which constructs a new tag that didn't exist before the inner tag was expanded (as is the case in your example). Of course you can cope with this if you are prepared to always go back to the start of the text and reparse the whole thing every time an inner tag is evaluated, but that is rather inefficient (that's basically how commonTagsHandler works, and this is the reason why tag handler registration is more efficient). -- CC
I know I have asked this before, but are you sure that it wouldn't be better to move to a table-driven parser in the long run?

Anyway, the enhancement suggestion is to remove these (from a user perspective) gratuitous differences. -- TW

I really doubt it. The existing parser tokenises the input stream, and minimises string operations wherever possible, so I doubt a table driven parser would be any faster.

Documenting the "gratuitous differences" (as described in Item3192 is the appropriate course of action. You can't stop plugin authors from performing arbitrary text replacements, but importing this arbitrariness into the core is not, IMHO, a good idea, so I'm discarding this.

CC

ItemTemplate
Summary Remove limitations from tags defined through registerTagHandler
ReportedBy TWiki:Main.ThomasWeigert
Codebase ~twiki4
SVN Range TWiki-4.1, Thu, 09 Nov 2006, build 11947
AppliesTo Engine
Component

Priority Enhancement
CurrentState No Action Required
WaitingFor

Checkins

TargetRelease n/a
Edit | Attach | Watch | Print version | History: r10 < r9 < r8 < r7 < r6 | Backlinks | Raw View |  Raw edit | More topic actions
Topic revision: r10 - 2006-12-29 - CrawfordCurrie
 
This site is powered by the TWiki collaboration platform Powered by PerlCopyright © 2008-2024 by the contributing authors. All material on this collaboration platform is the property of the contributing authors.
Ideas, requests, problems regarding TWiki? Send feedback