This section describes the contents of the template file itself.
This program will look for two sorts of special strings embedded within the template file: variables and commands.
Beginning with version 3.0, PSTextMerge will recognize either of two sets of command and variable delimiters automatically. The choice of delimiters will be triggered by the first command beginning delimiters encountered. The new delimiters are generally recommended, since they are more likely to be treated kindly by various HTML editors on the market when you are editing your template files.
Meaning | Original Delimiters | New Delimiters |
---|---|---|
Start of Command | << | <? |
End of Command | >> | ?> |
Start of Variable | << | =$ |
End of Variable | >> | $= |
Start of Variable Modifiers | & | & |
Variables will be replaced by values taken from the corresponding columns of the current data record, or from an internal table of global variables. Variables must be enclosed in the chosen delimiters. Each variable name must match a column heading from the data file, or a global name specified in a SET command. The comparison ignores case (upper or lower), embedded spaces and embedded punctuation when looking for a matching column heading. So a column heading of “First Name” will match with a variable of “firstname”, for example.
A variable, unlike a command, can appear anywhere within the template file, and need not be isolated on a line by itself. More than one variable can appear on the same line. Variables can be used within PSTextMerge commands, as well as other places within the template file.
The following special variables are predefined and available for substitution, no matter what data source is being used.
A variable can be optionally followed (within the less than/greater than signs) by a modifier indicator and one or more modifiers. The default modifier character is the ampersand (&).
The letters “U” or “L” (in either upper- or lower-case) will indicate that the variable is to be converted, respectively, to upper- or lower-case. If the letter “i” is also supplied (again in either upper- or lower-case), then only the first character of the variable value will be converted to the requested case. (The letter “i” stands for “initial”.)
The letter “X” will cause selected special characters to be translated to their equivalent XML entities. This is recommended, for example, when publishing an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.
The letter “H” will cause selected special characters to be translated to their equivalent HTML entities.
Convert a URL to an HTML anchor tag with that URL as the href value.
Remove HTML break (br) tags from the string.
The letter “B” will cause the file extension, including the period, to be removed from a file name. This can be used, for example, to generate an output file name with the same name as the input data file (using the variable name “datafilename”), but with a different extension.
Converts a string to a conventional, universal file name, changing spaces to dashes, removing any odd characters, making all letters lower-case, and converting white space to hyphens.
Remove awkward punctuation characters.
The letter “R”, in combination with a length modifier (see below), will cause the variable to be truncated to the given length, truncating characters on the left and keeping characters on the right.
One or more digits following the modifier indicator will be interpreted as the length to which the variable should be truncated or padded. If the length modifier is shorter than the variable length, then by default characters will be truncated on the right (and preserved on the left) of the variable to bring it to the specified length (if it is desired to keep characters on the right, then also use the “R” modifier, described above). If the length modifier is longer than the initial variable length, then the variable will be padded with zeroes on the left to bring it to the specified length.
An underscore character (“_”) following the modifier indicator will cause all spaces in the variable to be replaced by underscores. This can be useful when creating a file name, for example.
Any punctuation character other than an underscore following the modifier indicator will be interpreted as a separator that will be placed before the current variable, if the variable is non-blank, and if the preceding variable was also non-blank and also marked by a similar variable modifier. A space will be added after the separator, and before the current variable, if the punctuation is not a forwards or backwards slash (“/” or “"). This is an easy way to list several variables on a single line, separating non-blank ones from others with commas (or other punctuation).
If a variable may be interpreted as a series of “words,” with the words delimited by white space, punctuation, or transitions from lower to upper case (“two words”, “TWO_WORDS” or “twoWords”), then these variable modifiers may be used to change the way in which the words are delimited.
Letter | Meaning |
---|---|
c | This letter must begin the string, to indicate that modified word demarcation is desired. This should be followed by three letters, each with one of the following values. The first occurrence indicates what should be done with the first letter of the variable; the second occurrence indicates what should be done with the first letter of all other words; the third occurrence indicates what should be done with all other letters in the variable. |
u | This letter indicates that upper-case is desired. |
l | This letter indicates that lower-case is desired. |
a | This letter indicates that the case should be left as-is. |
- | Any character(s) following the ‘c’, other than ‘u’, ‘l’ or ‘a’, will be used as delimiters separating each word. |
For example, if the template file contained the following:
=$name&cuul$=
And the name variable was equal to:
HERB BOWIE
Then the resulting name in the output text file would be:
Herb Bowie
A string of characters indicating how the variable is to be formatted. The formatting string, if specified, should follow any other variable modifiers. Any character other than those listed above will cause the remainder of the variable modifiers to be treated as a formatting string. Currently, a formatting string is valid only for dates — either for the special variable today, or for any variable date in “mm/dd/yy” format.
A date formatting string follows the normal rules for Java date formatting. One or more occurrences of an upper-case “M” indicates a month, a lower-case “y” is used for a year, and a lower-case “d” is used for the day of the month. An upper-case “E” can be used for the day of the week. Generally, the number of occurrences of each letter you specify will be used to indicate the width of the field you want (“yyyy” for a 4-digit year, for example). Specifying more than two occurrences of “M” indicates you want the month represented by letters rather than numbers, with 4 or more occurrences indicating you want the month spelled out, and 3 occurrences indicating you want a three-letter abbreviation.
See below for full definition of allowable characters and their meanings.
Symbol | Meaning | Presentation | Example |
---|---|---|---|
G | era designator | Text | AD |
y | year | Number | 1996 |
M | month in year | Text & Number | July & 07 |
d | day in month | Number | 10 |
h | hour in am/pm | 1~12 | 12 |
H | hour in day | 0~23 | 0 |
m | minute in hour | Number | 30 |
s | second in minute | Number | 55 |
S | millisecond | Number | 978 |
E | day in week | Text | Tuesday |
D | day in year | Number | 189 |
F | day of week in month | Number | 2 (2nd Wed in July) |
w | week in year | Number | 27 |
W | week in month | Number | 2 |
a | am/pm marker | Text | PM |
k | hour in day | Number | 24 |
K | hour in am/pm | Number | 0 |
z | time zone | Text | Pacific Standard Time |
‘ | escape for text | Delimiter | |
single quote | Literal |
The count of pattern letters determine the format.
(Text): 4 or more pattern letters—use full form, < 4—use short or abbreviated form if one exists.
(Number): the minimum number of digits. Shorter numbers are zero-padded to this amount. Year is handled specially; that is, if the count of ‘y’ is 2, the Year will be truncated to 2 digits.
(Text & Number): 3 or over, use text, otherwise use number.
Any characters in the pattern that are not in the ranges of [‘a’..’z’] and [‘A’..’Z’] will be treated as quoted text. For instance, characters like ‘:’, ‘.’, ’ ‘, ‘#’ and ‘@’ will appear in the resulting time text even they are not embraced within single quotes.
All commands must be enclosed in the chosen delimiters. In addition, all commands must appear on lines by themselves. Command names can be in upper- or lower-case. Each command may have zero or more operands. Operands may be separated by any of the following delimiters: space, comma (‘,’), semi-colon (‘;’) or colon (‘:’). Operands that contain any of these delimiters must be enclosed in single or double-quotation marks.
The following commands are recognized. They are presented in the typical sequence in which they would be used.
<?delims new delimiters?>
<?output “filename.ext”?>
<?set global = 0?>
<?nextrec?>
<?include “filename.ext” ?>
<?ifchange =$variable$=?>
<?if =$variable$=?>
<?definegroup group-number =$variable$=?>
<?ifendgroup group-number?>
<?ifendlist group-number?>
<?ifnewlist group-number?>
<?ifnewgroup group-number?>
<?else?>
<?endif?>
<?loop?>
If used at all, this command should be the first command in the template file. This command overrides the standard delimiters used to recognize the beginnings and ends of commands and variables, for the remainder of the current template file. The command can have one to five operands. Each operand will become a new delimiter. They should be specified in the following order.
Note that, when using this command, this command itself must use the standard delimiters. The new delimiters should only begin to be used on following lines.
This command names and opens the output file. The single operand is the name of the output file. filename.ext should be the desired name of your output file. This command would normally be the first line in your template file. Subsequent template records will be written to the output file. Note, however, that the filename can contain a variable name. In this case, the output command would immediately follow the nextrec command, and a new output file would be opened for each tab-delimited data record.
This command can define a global variable and set its value. This command would normally have three operands: the name of the global variable, an operator, and a value.
One intended use for the SET command is to support a line counter. By initializing the value to 0, and then adding to it whenever an output line is generated, the IF command can be used to check for page overflow (in a table column, for example), and then start a new page or column, resetting the counter to 0 again.
Another common use for the SET command is to preserve record variables in global variables so that they will be available within an IFENDGROUP block.
This command indicates the beginning of the code that will be written out once per data record. Lines prior to the nextrec command will only be written out once.
This command allows you to include text from another file into the output stream being generated by the template.
An optional operand of “copy” will ensure that the include file is included without conversion; otherwise, if the input and output file extensions are different, and are capable of conversion, the input file will be converted to the output file’s format (for example, [Markdown][] or Textile can be converted to html).
Markdown conversion will be done using the Pegdown processor, using the options for typographic conversions (as with SmartyPants) and table generation.
If converting from Markdown, then an optional operand of “nometa” will cause metadata lines to be skipped when generating the HTML output; otherwise, they will be included.
The filename may include variables, allowing you to tailor the included content based on one or more fields from your input data source. This is especially useful when you would like to include output from another template in the output generated by this template (effectively combining outputs from two separate templates into a single output). If an include file is not found, then it will simply be skipped and processing will continue, with a log message to note the event.
For any conversion resulting in HTML, a pseudo-tag of <toc> can be used to generate a table of contents based on following heading tags. An optional attribute of “from” can be used to specify the beginning of a range of heading levels to be included; an optional attribute of “through” or “thru” can be used to specify the end of a range of heading levels to be included. See the following example.
<toc from="h2" thru="h4" />
The ifchange command can be used to test a variable to see if it has a different value than it did on the last data record. If the variable has changed, then the following lines up to the closing endif command will be subjected to normal output processing. If the variable has not changed, then following lines will be skipped until the closing endif command is encountered. This command can be used to generate some special header information whenever a key field changes. Note that only one variable can be used with ifchange commands in one template file, since the value of any ifchange command is simply compared to the variable for the last ifchange command encountered.
The if command can be used to test a variable to see if it is non-blank. If the variable is non-blank, then the following lines up to the closing endif command will be subject to normal output processing. If the variable is blank, then following lines will be skipped until the closing endif command is encountered. In this case, the first and only operand would be the variable to be tested.
The if command can also be used to test a variable to compare it to one or more constants. In this case, the command would have three or more operands: the name of the variable, a logical operator, and one or more values.
This is the first of five commands that define key fields and then conditionally write output when there is a break on any of those fields. Up to ten group break fields can be defined. Each must be assigned a number from 1 to 10. Numbers should be assigned sequentially beginning with 1. Input data should normally be sorted by the same fields used in any definegroup commands. Definegroup commands should precede ifendgroup and ifnewgroup commands, and should generally be specified in ascending order by group number. The definegroup command has two operands.
Group Number. This must be a number from 1 to 10. Numbers should be assigned sequentially beginning with 1. Lower-numbered groups are considered more major than higher-numbered groups, in the sense that lower-numbered group breaks will automatically trigger higher-numbered group breaks.
Variable Name. This is the name of the key field variable.
This is the second of the five group commands. Lines following this command and preceding the next group or endif command will be written to the output file at the end of a group of records sharing a common value for this key field. Ifendgroup commands should follow definegroup commands and precede ifnewgroup commands, and should generally be specified in descending order by group number. The ifendgroup command has one operand.
Note that references to record variables within an IFENDGROUP block will retrieve the data from the record causing the break (i.e., the first record in the new group), not the last record in the group just ended. Use the SET command to save data in global variables if you need to later access it when a group break has been detected.
This is the third of the five group commands. Lines following this command and preceding the next group or endif command will be written to the output file at the end of a list of records containing this key field. The end of a list will be triggered by a change in key values at the next higher level, or by a record containing blanks at the current group level. Ifendlist commands should follow ifendgroup commands and precede ifnewlist commands, and should generally be specified in descending order by group number. The ifendlist command has one operand. Note that the ifendlist and ifnewlist commands can generally be used to insert HTML tags to end a list and begin a list.
Note that references to record variables within an IFENDLIST block will retrieve the data from the record causing the break (i.e., the first record in the new group), not the last record in the group just ended. Use the SET command to save data in global variables if you need to later access it when a list break has been detected. Note that the ifendlist and ifnewlist commands can generally be used to insert HTML tags to end a list and begin a list.
This is the fourth of the five group commands. Lines following this command and preceding the next group or endif command will be written to the output file at the beginning of a new list of records at this group level. Ifnewlist commands should follow definegroup, ifendgroup and ifendlist commands, should precede ifnewgroup commands, and should generally be specified in ascending order by group number. The ifnewlist command has one operand.
This is the fifth of the five group commands. Lines following this command and preceding the next group or endif command will be written to the output file at the beginning of a group of records sharing a common value for this key field. Ifnewgroup commands should follow all other group commands, and should generally be specified in ascending order by group number. The ifnewgroup command has one operand.
The else command terminates the scope of its corresponding if, ifchange, ifendgroup or ifnewgroup command, and applies the opposite logical condition to the following template lines.
The endif command terminates the scope of its corresponding if, ifchange, ifendgroup or ifnewgroup command.
This command indicates the end of the code that will be written out once per data record. Lines after the loop command will be written out once per output file created, at the end of each file.