pythoncard-users

[Pythoncard-users] textEditor sample upgrades

[Kevin A. <al...@se...>]

Now that the TextArea widget uses the RichEdit control and can work with
files larger than 32K I decided to upgrade the textEditor sample. The
version in cvs has:
  New and Save menu items
  a documentChanged flag
  a filename argument is accepted on the command-line

I reworked all the file operations so the user has a chance to save changes.
The logic can be confusing sometimes, but I think it is working pretty much
like the Windows Notepad application as far as the new/open/save/save
as/exit logic is concerned.

I will add a Replace dialog once we are using wxPython 2.3.2. I also need to
work out how I'm going to do whole word matches in the text. I don't think
there is an option just using a plain Python string operation, so I probably
have to resort to using a regular expression. Perhaps some text wizard like
Neil will enlighten me. :)

Remember to only work on backup copies of files in case there are bugs.
However, I do appreciate any feedback I can get.

The next step is to cleanup and refactor the code so there is a real
document model and then see how it can be abstracted for other apps and what
similarities it has to the addresses sample.

ka

Re: [Pythoncard-users] textEditor sample upgrades

[Neil H. <ne...@sc...>]

Kevin Altis:

> I will add a Replace dialog once we are using wxPython 2.3.2. I also
> need to work out how I'm going to do whole word matches in the
> text. I don't think there is an option just using a plain Python string
> operation, so I probably have to resort to using a regular expression.
> Perhaps some text wizard like Neil will enlighten me. :)

   Regular expressions can be used but I find them confusing. If you want to
combine a user entered string with a regular expression search then you need
to check the user string for regular expression metacharacters and quote
them.

   A wizard's hat is reasonably similar to a dunce's cap so I chose the
essentially dumb approach of looping, searching for the string and if found
checking if the match is a word. If it is then report success, else try
again. You can define a word in many ways, often as starting and ending with
a character from the set of word characters (often A-Za-z0-9) and with the
characters before and after the match not being from this set.

   Scintilla's concept of a word is a little more complex than that but that
is because it wants to do a good job on programming text where sequences of
punctuation such as "->" or identifiers next to punctuation such as ".text"
make good "word" searches.

   Neil