paragraph it!

[sde]

have you ever come across a very very long post where the author didn't press enter once? it is just one huge block off code? i was reading a huge post over at another forum today and a few people refused to read it. i thought about it a little and came up with a solution. i wrote a script that parses the text and creates line breaks so it is readable. it is pretty simple but it was fun none the less. it basically takes a string into a character array. then it looks for periods. when it finds a period, it increases a variable to determine when the next paragraph should start. at first i had it starting a new paragraph after every other period, but then i was talking with a co-worker and we thought that it would probably feel more human if it varied. i then just used the ternary operator to alternate the max number of periods in the paragraph. for now it only alters between 2 and 3, but i'm sure a more robust version could be made. i then decided that maybe it would look nice if each sentence was capitolized, so i set the first character after each period to upper case. once it was all said and done and i had posted it on the forum that the inspirational block post came from, i started writing this block of text here. as i wrote the first couple sentences i noticed that i had not thought about other end-of-sentence punctuation such as the quesiton marks in my first couple sentences. i then modified the script to handle those. hopefully you haven't read this whole thing without paragraphing it, so here is the link if you want a more comfortable read pAraGRaPh-iT

[Belisarius]

Heaven help it should it ever have to interpret a post of mine . . .

Now, for version 2, you think it could correct capitalization?

[sde]

hehe, oh no. i don't think i'll be spending much more time on this one.

[technobard]

That's funny...and it brings back old memories. I wrote a Perl script once upon a time to extract DDL from an Oracle export file. It would also change the storage parameters (i.e. extent size, tablespace name, etc.), but that's beside the point. Well, the first snag I hit using this thing was that Oracle stores the DDL (SQL for creating the object) as a single line. Tables with lots of columns and/or lots of long column names would occasionally produce a string that was too long for SQL*Plus to process.

So, I modified the script to create lines that were a maximum of 10 words long. Nothing fancy; no punctuation to worry about. I still dig the script out and tweak it every couple of years.

[ender]

I like it!

[idx]

I think I need this for work when people email a crappy paragraph glob and need help.

[Admin]

everyforumneedsthistypeofthing.ireallyhatewhenpeop ledontuseparagraphs!italsosuckswhentheydonthitthes pacebarwhentheyaretypingabunchofstuffaboutyourorig inalpost.hehe.thisisthelongestsinglelineintheoworl d.bye.

[sde]

uh .. i think i need to write sPaCE iT now