I'm working on a converter that generates HTML as part of a
CGI script... Much of the parsing is character driver.
Occasionally, we see a sequence which means "start bold-italic"
(much like ".BI" in troff)... So we must either generate a
"<b><i>" or "<i><b>" sequence.
Yes, I know I should be using <em> and <strong>. Nevermind.
The question is this. After the "start bold-italic"
sequence, I must see a "start bold" sequence or a "start italic"
sequence. Obviously, <b><i>something</i> else</b> or
<i><b>yet</b> another</i> is preferrable to
<i><b>something</b></i> <b>else</b> or <b><i>yet</i></b> <i>another</i>
in terms of conciseness or parsability.
I currently just do the following on a wrapper in perl:
s/(<[bi]>)(</[bi]>)/$2$1/g;
but this is ugly.
Any better ideas?
Thanks,
-Philip