Re: [Docutils-develop] reST.php?

[Richard J. <rj...@ek...>]

On Fri, 20 Sep 2002 8:17 pm, Axel Kollmorgen wrote:
> i'm a contributor to drupal ( http://drupal.org ), a php content
> management/discussion engine. me and some others there quite like rST,
> and we are currently discussing ( http://drupal.org/node.php?id=507#649
> ,
> http://drupal.org/node.php?title=Structured+Text+-+filter+enhancement )
> the use of (re)StructuredText for submitting (and maybe storing) content
> to the system. hence my questions:

Sounds like a fine idea.


> - does a php port of (re)StructuredText exists?

No.


> - does a php port of something similar to (re)StructuredText exists
> (aside of http://www.keithdevens.com/software/ , StructuredText Markup)?

*shrug*


> - does any other language port of rST or similar exists?

No. There should be :)


> - as there is probably none of above: do you think it is possible to
> port rST to php? more specifically:
>   . is there any general experience in porting python to php?

I'm sure there's some out there, you just need to find it :) Seriously, I've 
never seen any conversion information between the two. I've seen some 
skin-deep comparisons, and they look similar - on the surface, PHP is Python 
with added punctuation ... "and bugs" according to our PHP developer :)


>   . how much of / which parts of the docutils distribution would be
> required to port for basic functionality, i.e. for rendering html? how
> much for more functionality including xml-storage?

Fortunately, the design of the docutils project is quite clean and organised, 
and you can see how it all works at:

   http://docutils.sourceforge.net/#specification

See PEP 258 for a description of the processing framework itself. That works 
along the basic lines of:

1. read from a source document, parsing the structure out of it and creating a
   DOM tree (http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/doctree.html)
2. optionally do some transforms on the tree (NOOP for current ReST reader)
3. pass the DOM to a writer, in this case HTML
4. perform any HTML-specific DOM transforms (insert system messages, turn
   references into hyperlinks, handle footnotes, ...)
5. turn the DOM into HTML


>   . is there any developer documentation about the code structure /
> class hierarchies / ... beside
> http://docutils.sourceforge.net/#docutils-internals , the code and the
> devel-mailing list?

See the above specification link. At a minimum, you could just implement a 
parser for ReST and your own framework for generating the HTML. If that's the 
case, you just need the ReST format specification:

    http://docutils.sourceforge.net/spec/rst/reStructuredText.html

Hope this helps :)



        Richard