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Newbie Joined: 16 Oct 2005 Posts: 7

Hello,

I am currently creating a program that stores news posts into a database. Right now what I'm doing is capturing the multi-line news posts into a variable and updating the respective field in the database with the variable text. This works fine, but if possible I would like to maintain the formatting one sees when reading the news post in the MUD. As such I've reached my wit's end trying to figure out how to capture a blank line into a variable in order to maintain the paragraph spacing and whatnot. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, and if this is too vague I'll be happy to provide more details.

Thanks in advance,
Tievel

Posted: Mon Mar 26, 2007 6:59 am

Well, there are a couple of ways of doing it depending on how you're printing the news posts afterwards. And what kind of database you're using to store the posts. If you're using a stringlist for example and running through each item #saying them, you could add an item %cr to the list, or an item "". It really depends on exactly how your script works.

Apprentice Joined: 04 Mar 2007 Posts: 103

is there away to trigger on cr or a lf? i would be interested in writing a trigger to replace a cr with the red text cr then the real cr and so on. to help me understand how the mudd and zmud are dealing with these items. currently i have a script doing a very similar thing as tievel mentioned above, i am capturing %line's using concat to add them to a var and for some reason the blank lines do not seem to get added to the var.

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

I think this is what you want.

Newbie Joined: 16 Oct 2005 Posts: 7

First of all, thank you for the responses.

The code above seemingly did the trick of capturing the blank lines into variables, but I'm still running into the problem of maintaining the formatting when it goes into the database with #VAR databasers("PostText").Value @Variable

Thank you again for the help and sorry to be a bother.

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Try this instead.
#VAR databasers("PostText").Value {(@Variable)}

Newbie Joined: 16 Oct 2005 Posts: 7

First of all, thank you again for the help.

Unfortunately it still isn't working. I've pretty much given up on the idea of maintaining formatting inside the zmud variable. What I'm thinking of trying next is to insert some sort of marker and then have an external program go through the database and reformat the text. Thoughts?

Wizard Joined: 11 Jul 2002 Posts: 1265 Location: USA

Ah, the external program explains it not working. I don't use external programs with cmud/zmud so I assumed you were using internal commands somehow!

Instead of using %lf you could use "mynewline" or some other string then turn around in the external program and use its replace function to put in the newlines. If you already know a command for the external program to make a newline then you could use THAT command. An example would be to use a <br> for HTML.

#TRIGGER {^$} {#var variable %concat( @variable, "<br>")}

Newbie Joined: 16 Oct 2005 Posts: 7

Thank you for all your help, Arminas. I will do just that.

Enchanter Joined: 05 Mar 2003 Posts: 593 Location: Canada

Is it possible that the reason you're not getting the right formatting is that you're adding only linefeed %lf, or only carriage return %cr to the end of the line?
Don't must programs on Windows see a newline as a carriage return and a linefeed?
Try terminating the line with %{cr}%{lf} and see if that makes a difference.

Anyways here's hoping Smile

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