On Feb 11, 2008, at 10:15 AM, Rich Bowen wrote:
On Oct 22, 2007, at 14:07, Jim Jagielski wrote:
I'm a little concerned if the module ships /without/ the 'f'latten
flag
triggered by default. I'd rather the module offered the inverse
option.
This is truly a 'bug' users won't understand (my text contains
'jimfoojag',
why isn't it translating to 'jimbarjag'?!?)
It would... it's only an issue really if there are subsequent
substitutions *and* a previous substitution would result in
a string that would also be affected by a latter one.
Sorry to dredge up an ancient thread, but I'm finally using
mod_substitute in production, and I'm finding this to be much more
complex than the contrived example.
Are there cases in which it might just happen to work without
flattening? And, if so, is it possible that it will work sometimes
and not other times, or is it going to be completely consistent from
one pass to the next?
I've gotten some answers to these on IRC, so it may be that the
light is beginning to dawn.
The actual example that I'm using is here : http://apache.pastebin.ca/899919
Slightly more complex than just s/foo/bar/
The background is probably too stupid to go into - using TinyMCE to
edit content, and IE7 unwilling to honor align="left" in certain
contexts.
IN general, think of it this way. mod_substitute generally works on
content within a bucket. Say we have a bucket that contains the
text "Rich Bowen wants a pony dude" and we have the directive to
change 'pony' to 'puma'. Without flattening, mod_substitute turns
this single bucket into 3, the 1st containing "Rich Bowen wants a ",
the 2nd containing "puma" and the third containing " dude".
If there are no more substitutions, then we're golden and can move on.
But NOW say that you also have another sub that wants to turn 'a puma'
into 'an aardvark'... Since it's operating on buckets, even though
the *stream* contains 'a pony', it's not in a single bucket, in
which case *this* substitution will never happen.
So if you have substituted content that you think will be re-substituted
by another rule, then you should flatten. If they are one-shots, or
self contained, or in "no way" could result in overlaps, then flattening
isn't required. :)
