Re: [Pythoncard-users] source code copy and paste problems in docs

[Andy T. <an...@ha...>]

Kevin Altis wrote:
> On Dec 19, 2005, at 5:14 PM, Alex Tweedly wrote:
> 
>> Kevin Altis wrote:
>>
>>> I'm sending this message to the general list rather than the  
>>> pythoncard-devel list in hopes that some HTML/CSS expert will have a  
>>> suggestion for how we can clean up our Python example code in the  
>>> documentation so it can be copied and pasted.
>>>
>>> ka
>>>
>>> ---
>>>
>>> It was pointed out to me by Don Taylor that source examples in the 
>>> docs  can't be copied and pasted and run correctly. He specifically 
>>> mentioned  this code block in walkthrough2.html which you can see here:
>>>
>>> http://pythoncard.sourceforge.net/walkthrough2.html
>>>
>>> <p class="code">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;def 
>>> on_incrBtn_mouseClick(self,  event):<br />
>>> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;startValue =  
>>> int(self.components.field1.text)<br />
>>> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;endValue = startValue 
>>> +  1<br />
>>> &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; 
>>> self.components.field1.text
>>> = str(endValue)</p>
>>>
>>> The code looks fine displayed in the browser, but if someone tries to 
>>>  copy, paste, and then run it then the &nbsp; messes it up. Since 
>>> this  isn't an old-style <pre></pre> block you can't simply use 
>>> spaces in the  code to get the desired effect. The CSS we have 
>>> defined for the style  is:
>>>
>> The &nbsp; shouldn't mess it up - the browser should copy that as spaces.
>> And indeed that's what it does for me :
>>
>> WinXP
>> copy from : Firefox 1.0.4    and    IE 6.0
>> paste into : Emacs, Notepad and tabcodeEditor
>>
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net
>>
> 
> Hmm, pasting the second line of the code into the tabCodeEditor and 
> turning on show invisibles I could see that all was not well. 
> Investigating in the shell I got:
> 
>  >>> self.currentDocument.text
> ' \xca\xca\xca\xca\xca\xca\xca\xcastartValue = 
> int(self.components.field1.text)\n'
>  >>> s = self.currentDocument.text
>  >>> s[0]
> ' '
>  >>> ord(s[0])
> 32
>  >>> ord(s[1])
> 202
> 
> So there is a space at the beginning, followed by the eight non-breaking 
> spaces. The copy/paste was done from Safari to the tabCodeEditor, so 
> platform differences could be at fault here. Anyway, I did try just 
> junking the <p class="code"> and non-breaking spaces and just using a 
> <pre> block and that seemed to look fine and gave me exactly what I 
> expected (i.e. just spaces). As long as <pre> is still valid I lean 
> toward just falling back to that. Harold Marshall sent me a message that 
> makes me think <pre> is still okay.
> 
> Howard said:
> Two good howto's are: "CSS Tip: Adding Whitespace To Text" ( 
> http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol6/css_no9.htm )and "Making 
> preformated <pre> text wrap in CSS3, Mozilla, Opera and IE" ( 
> http://myy.helia.fi/~karte/pre-wrap-css3-mozilla-opera-ie.html ) which 
> also addresses "code snippets".
> 
> In our case we shouldn't be concerned about wrapping, adding color to 
> the text, etc.
> 
> BTW, have I mentioned lately how much I still love having a Python shell 
> available in my Python editor with access to the guts of the 
> application! ;-)
> 
> ka
> 

On my Mac with the documentation displayed in Safari copying and pasting 
into both Vim and Aquamacs appears to be fine.

Having said that I've got no objections to changing the code samples to 
use <pre> blocks instead of the "code" class.

Any volunteers?

Regards,
Andy
-- 
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