TAS Must Die, Chapter 21

Work's been a killer lately. I haven't done much on my project. I decided, since I was pretty tired, to concentrate on getting all my junit tests to work. The biggest problem I had was that I was playing fast and loose with white space. Basically when passing HTML from the input stream to the output stream, I was losing all leading and trailing spaces. This is ok until we get some iscript embedded variables in there:

(*v1*) hello

is not the same as

(*v1*)hello

It was actually pretty tricky to get this to work properly. The parser assumes correctly that all whitespace in the iscript and embedded variable sections is removed as we read from the InputStream. Otherwise we'd have to load the parser up with explicit code to devour the spaces that appear between tokens. I had to use a modal flag so I could tell when to ignore whitespace and when not to. Most unfortunate but a more practical answer doesn't present itself.

If I were using a parser generator, inserting code to devour whitespace would be easy. Adding such code to a hand-coded parser would make the code hard to read.

At this point I need to gather more iscript sample files and continue improving the parser.