Transformations

One of the core features of XSharper is support for text transformations, which are controlled by transform (or, shortened, tr) attribute of almost all actions.

This attribute controls:

text whitespace trimming (start, end, internal, every line )
replacing (~ may be replaced with spaces, non-printable characters with . dot, curved or square braces with angled, CRLF to LF or vice versa and so on)
character escaping (for XML, or C-like, or regular expressions)
expression expansions (whether expressions defined as ${var} or ${{var}} or [[var]] are evaluated and result inserted into text)
order in which the escaping and trimming is done (after or before variable expansion)

<!-- PRINT.XSH -->

<print tr="trim squareToAngle">

        [xml]I hate writing all these &gt; and &lt; but sometimes it's easier to use square brackets and replace them with angle[/xml]

</print>

<set firstName="Michael" />

<set lastName="Parker" />

<print>----BEGIN --</print>

<print tr="trim multiLine expandSquare">

        Dear [firstName] [LastNAME],

        Best regards,

        XSharper development team

</print>

<print>----END --</print>

Default transformation is Expand, i.e. expand multi-expressions formatted as ${multi}

Another note is that transformation applies to all text attributes of an action, including the value. It's possible to explicitly exclude the value by setting verbatim="true" attribute.

<set text="Michael" />

<!-- Prints Name is: Michael -->

<print tr="expand">Name is: ${text}</print>

<!-- Prints Name is: ${text} -->

<print tr="expand" verbatim="true">Name is: ${text}</print>

Complete list of transformations can be obtained as

C:\>xsharper /? transformRules                                                                                                                                                                        

XSharper v.0.9.1243.0 DeltaX Inc. Copyright (c) 2006-2010

enum TransformRules (XSharper.Core.TransformRules)

Enum values:

  None                  0x0000000000 No expansion

  Expand                0x0000000001 Expand ${variables}

  ExpandDual            0x0000000003 Expand variables formatted as ${{var}}

  ExpandSquare          0x0000000005 Expand variables formatted as [var]

  ExpandDualSquare      0x0000000009 Expand variables formatted as [[var]]

  ExpandReplaceOnly     0x0000000011 Do replacements only in expanded text

  ExpandTrimOnly        0x0000000021 Trim expanded text only

  ExpandAfterTrim       0x0000000081 Trim first, expand later

  TrimBeforeExpand      0x0000000081 Trim first, expand later

  ExpandMask            0x00000000ff Expand flags mask

  TrimStart             0x0000000100 Trim whitespace at the beginning of the string

  TrimEnd               0x0000000200 Trim whitespace at the end of the string

  Trim                  0x0000000300 Trim whitespace at the beginning and at the end of the string

  TrimInternal          0x0000000400 Trim internal whitespace

  Multiline             0x0000000800 Treat the string as multiline, and do processing of each line

  TrimMask              0x0000000f00 All trim flags mask

  TildaToSpace          0x0000010000 Replace ~ with space

  BackqToDouble         0x0000020000 Replace ` with "

  CurvedToAngle         0x0000040000 Replace { with < , and } with >

  SquareToAngle         0x0000080000 Replace [ with < , and ] with >

  NewLineToLF           0x0000100000 Replace new lines with a single LF

  NewLineToCRLF         0x0000200000 Replace new line with CR LF

  DoubleSingleQuotes    0x0000400000 Convert ' to '' (useful for SQL)

  DoubleDoubleQuotes    0x0000800000 Convert " to "" (useful for C#)

  EscapeXml             0x0001000000 Escape all XML special characters

  QuoteArg              0x0002000000 If the string contains spaces, wrap it in double quotes. Internal double quotes are replaced with "

  EscapeRegex           0x0004000000 Escape all special regex characters

  RemoveControl         0x0008000000 Replace all non-ASCII characters with . (dot)

  UnescapeC             0x0010000000 Unescape C# strings, e.g. \n => newline

  EscapeC               0x0020000000 Escape C# strings, e.g. newline character => \n etc

  TabToSpaces2          0x0040000000 Tabs to spaces (counting tab as 2 spaces)

  TabToSpaces4          0x0080000000 Tabs to spaces (counting tab as 4 spaces)

  TabToSpaces8          0x00c0000000 Tabs to spaces (counting tab as 8 spaces)

  ReplaceMask           0x00ffff0000 All replace flags

  Default               0x0000000001 Default transformation