Re: [Groff] Line continuation

[Miklos Somogyi]

Keith, Ralph & Werner,

Thank you all for your suggestions. I think that the .nop thing is  
very ingenious but perhaps
a preprocessor that needs to be done only once is the the better way  
to go.

Folks, I've tried your sed things but either my sed does not work  
(like eqn) or some special characters
don't come through properly in Mail.
I know that sed is a very good thing but  I can't get into it. At my  
age it is better to stick to what I know.
And I can do the thing in Perl easily, perhaps not so neatly. And Perl  
works well under Mac OS 10.5.5.

Once again: thank you folks for your kind help,

Miklos

On 27/10/2008, at 00:17 AM, Keith Marshall wrote:

> On Sunday 26 October 2008 11:27:38 Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> > To change the sed script to treat a backslash at the end of the
> > line as the continuation marker, you just need to be aware that it
> > needs escaping with another, like Perl.
> >
> >     sed ':l;/\\$/{N;s/\\\n *//;b l}'
>
> I too would choose sed, but do be aware of a possible pitfall in the
> above: POSIX demands that the closing brace of a command group be
> separated from the preceding command, by a newline.
>
> Recent versions of GNU sed relax this requirement, and accept the
> above; some earlier versions may choke on it, but accept
>
>    sed ':l;/\\$/{N;s/\\\n *//;b l;}'
>
> (note the additional semicolon).  For strict POSIX conformance, it
> should be written as
>
>    sed -e':l;/\\$/{N;s/\\\n *//;b l' -e'}'
>
> or
>
>    sed ':l;/\\$/{N;s/\\\n *//;b l
>         }'
>
> (spanning two lines, with a newline within the quoted expression).
>
> Regards,
> Keith.