fish-shell/doc_src/cmds/string-collect.rst
Johannes Altmanninger c0d1e41313 docs synopsis: add HTML highlighing and automate manpage markup
Recent synopsis changes move from literal code blocks to
[RST line blocks].  This does not translate well to HTML: it's not
rendered in monospace, so aligment is lost.  Additionally, we don't
get syntax highlighting in HTML, which adds differences to our code
samples which are highlighted.

We hard-wrap synopsis lines (like code blocks). To align continuation
lines in manpages we need [backslashes in weird places]. Combined with
the **, *, and `` markup, it's a bit hard to get the alignment right.

Fix these by moving synopsis sources back to code blocks and compute
HTML syntax highlighting and manpage markup with a custom Sphinx
extension.

The new Pygments lexer can tokenize a synopsis and assign the various
highlighting roles, which closely matches fish's syntax highlighing:
- command/keyword (dark blue)
- parameter (light blue)
- operator like and/or/not/&&/|| (cyan)
- grammar metacharacter (black)

For manpage output, we don't project the fish syntax highlighting
but follow the markup convention in GNU's man(1):

	bold text          type exactly as shown.
	italic text        replace with appropriate argument.

To make it easy to separate these two automatically, formalize that
(italic) placeholders must be uppercase; while all lowercase text is
interpreted literally (so rendered bold).
This makes manpages more consistent, see string-join(1) and and(1).

Implementation notes:
Since we want manpage formatting but Sphinx's Pygments highlighing
plugin does not support manpage output, add our custom "synopsis"
directive.  This directive parses differently when manpage output is
specified. This means that the HTML and manpage build processes must
not share a cache, because the parsed doctrees are cached.  Work around
this by using separate cache locations for build targets "sphinx-docs"
(which creates HTML) and "sphinx-manpages".  A better solution would
be to only override Sphinx's ManualPageBuilder but that would take a
bit more code (ideally we could override ManualPageWriter but Sphinx
4.3.2 doesn't really support that).

---

Alternative solution: stick with line blocks but use roles like
:command: or :option: (or custom ones). While this would make it
possible to produce HTML that is consistent with code blocks (by adding
a bit of CSS), the source would look uglier and is harder to maintain.
(Let's say we want to add custom formatting to the [|] metacharacters
in HTML.  This is much easier with the proposed patch.)

---

[RST line blocks]: https://docutils.sourceforge.io/docs/ref/rst/restructuredtext.html#line-blocks
[backslashes in weird places]: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/pull/8626#discussion_r782837750
2022-01-19 22:56:41 +08:00

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ReStructuredText

string-collect - join strings into one
======================================
Synopsis
--------
.. BEGIN SYNOPSIS
.. synopsis::
string collect [-N | --no-trim-newlines] [STRING ...]
.. END SYNOPSIS
Description
-----------
.. BEGIN DESCRIPTION
``string collect`` collects its input into a single output argument, without splitting the output when used in a command substitution. This is useful when trying to collect multiline output from another command into a variable. Exit status: 0 if any output argument is non-empty, or 1 otherwise.
A command like ``echo (cmd | string collect)`` is mostly equivalent to a quoted command substitution (``echo "$(cmd)"``). The main difference is that the former evaluates to zero or one elements whereas the quoted command substitution always evaluates to one element due to string interpolation.
If invoked with multiple arguments instead of input, ``string collect`` preserves each argument separately, where the number of output arguments is equal to the number of arguments given to ``string collect``.
Any trailing newlines on the input are trimmed, just as with ``"$(cmd)"`` substitution. Use ``--no-trim-newlines`` to disable this behavior, which may be useful when running a command such as ``set contents (cat filename | string collect -N)``.
With ``--allow-empty``, ``string collect`` always prints one (empty) argument. This can be used to prevent an argument from disappearing.
.. END DESCRIPTION
Examples
--------
.. BEGIN EXAMPLES
::
>_ echo "zero $(echo one\ntwo\nthree) four"
zero one
two
three four
>_ echo \"(echo one\ntwo\nthree | string collect)\"
"one
two
three"
>_ echo \"(echo one\ntwo\nthree | string collect -N)\"
"one
two
three
"
>_ echo foo(true | string collect --allow-empty)bar
foobar
.. END EXAMPLES