Maintaining comments and structure....

[<jam...@te...>]

Hi All,

I hope this is not off topic, as its not a direct webmin question, but
certainly is in the
domain of the sort of problem it would be good if webmin (as a developer
library
helped solve).  Anyway, caveat aside here is the question.

I have written many scripts that in an automated fashion modify config
files.  I have also
on occasion had the need to write my little parsers for config files, but
in general these have
been used to read the config file and rarely have I made it rewrite out the
config file.  That being said
I have had the need to do so many times, but I have avoided because the way
my parsers had been
written they did not maintain the white-space structure and comments of the
orignal config file.
If I would have written the config files back out after making changes to
them, I would have totally
lost all tabbing and comments.

All that being said I was wondering:

     a) has anyone solved this probably generally in a perl module?
     b) better yet has anyone solved the problem as something that can be
used in webmin?
     c) what ideas and experience do the webmin developers have with this
problem?

In a vague way I had the idea of creating two parse trees.  The first is
the AST that is used for doing thing, and querying
information gathered from the parse phase.  The second tree (really not
sure if it would be called a parse tree) would essentially
be a chunked up version of the original config which the objects in the AST
would point to (or would the chunks in the
this tree point to the objects int he AST or both).  Anyway, that is my
thus far confused approach I have been considering
but I would really like to hear what other have done and or think.

Cheers...james