Rails Against The Machine

I neglected this blog partly due to lack of enthusiasm, partly because I've been writing java for the last few months and partly because it was so hard to post code / html samples to blogger. One would have thought that the might of google would have been capable of creating something along the lines of

<code language=ruby>
some ruby code
</code>

Or even providing some help on how to post code, but no it was not to be. ....Here is a rake task to help I adapted it from this article .

First install the syntax plugin: gem install syntax and then create the following file to

lib\tasks\blog.rake

require 'syntax/convertors/html'
require 'win32/clipboard'
include Win32

namespace :format do
  desc "This task will format code in  the clipboard or file specified by file=\"filename\" as html"
  task :ruby4display do
  BloggingTools.ruby4display 
  end
  
  desc "This task will format  code in  the clipboard or file specified by file=\"filename\" as html"
  task :html4display do
  BloggingTools.html4display 
  end
end

#Actual functions are defined in a separate class to ease testing and keep things clean and dry
class BloggingTools 

  def self.ruby4display
    convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "ruby"
    code_html = convertor.convert(input)
    output code_html
  end

  def self.html4display
    convertor = Syntax::Convertors::HTML.for_syntax "xml"
    code_html = convertor.convert(input)
    output code_html
  end
  
  def self.input
    if ENV['file']
      puts "#{ENV['file']} will be processed and copied to the clipboard" 
      in_data = File.read(ENV['file'])
    else
      puts "no arguments supplied data will be taken from clipboard"
      in_data = Clipboard.data
    end
  end
  
  def self.output code_html
    if ENV['file']
      fn= "#{File.basename(ENV['file'], File.extname(ENV['file']))}.html"
      puts "output to file #{fn}" 
      in_data = File.open(fn, File::WRONLY|File::TRUNC|File::CREAT)
      in_data.puts code_html
    else
      puts "output to clipboard"
      Clipboard.set_data(code_html)
    end
    
  end
  

end

If you run the rake task without arguments it copies from and to the clipboard, if you provide a file name then it takes that file as input and produces a similarly named html file as output.

Why a rake task? Well its easy to run from within netbeans and we can with minimal adaptation use it in the future as part of our "build process" e.g. automatically upload changes to a "change blog" so we can tell at a glance what the other developers have been up to e.g. in pseudocode

find modified files:
update svn
send svn link and code for all files with time and author to our internal blog!

Incidently ENV['key'] is how you access arguments within rake not ARGV[n]