[PLUG] tree to html

[Paul Heinlein]

On Fri, 13 Dec 2002, Kyle Accardi wrote:

> 	for f in "$(find . | sort)"; do
> 	  echo "$f" | sed -e 's![^/]\+/!\ \ !g' -e 's!$!<br>!'
>    	done
> 
> perhaps you could help me grok the sed command, though
> 
> you're substituting everything before a / with  &nbsp and
> tacking <br> to the end, but my reference doesn't talk about the
> plus sign.  Is that to indicate multiple substitutions?

  sed -e 's![^/]\+/!\ \ !g'

My Rosetta Stone, where C == command line, E == English translation of 
command line, and N == misc. notes.

  C: sed -e
  E: Hey, sed. I need you to do something for me.

  C: 's!!!'
  E: I'd like you to do some text substitution for me.
  N: Perl just stole this notation, since it was familiar to sed-ites.

  C: [^/]\+/
  E: Look for one or more characters (excluding a forward slash) that
     are followed by a forward slash.
  N: The '+' isn't universally honored by all sed implementations. I 
     know that Sun's sed can't grok it. GNU sed might be unique. In 
     fact, now that I look through the sed texinfo and man pages, I 
     see that the '+' isn't even documented. Wierd. I guess I at some 
     point extrapolated from, e.g., the expr syntax.

  C: \ \ 
  E: Replace that text with "  ".
  N: The & needs to be escaped lest sed interpret it as what the 
     sed(1) man page calls "the special character &" that refers
     "to that portion of the pattern space which matched."

  C: g
  E: Do that replacement as often as you can on the text you're
     reading.

> And the bangs don't jibe with my book which says "applies the
> command to all lines except the selected ones".

The bangs are just separators for the s/// command; I could just as 
easily have used commas, slashes, carats, hashes, or what-have-you. I 
like exclamation marks because I rarely have them in the text I'm 
matching, unlike forward slashes, which occur all the time in 
filenames.

--Paul Heinlein <heinlein at attbi.com>