WPP v2.10 - The Web Preprocessor Author : Marco Lamberto
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WPP is a small perl5 script that allows preprocessing of html files. You can define variables, which are abbreviations for longer constructs, and include common html fragments. It's useful for giving an uniform layout to different html pages. It can be used into cgi-bin programs for automatic generation of pages. With less html code inside them you can make more flexible and readable scripts. WPP provides four separate facilities that you can use as you see fit: Inclusion of text/html fragments. Variables expansion. Conditional generation. Macros expansion.

Index License Mailing Lists Installing WPP Known bugs Contacting the author Thanks! User Manual WPP command line switches General notes A step by step example Step 1: Yor first file Step 2: Using templates Step 3: The config files and the conditional generation Variables and constants Variables assignment Variables substitution Read-only variables Directives Macros Macro expansion Built-in macros Configuration variables and directives Keywords list Links and references Test page

License

WPP is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). As such, you can use this program free of charge but there is no warranty.

Feel free to link WPP by adding the official logo into your web pages.

Mailing Lists

wpp-announce

Here you can receive a message only when WPP updates.

If this form doesn't work you can subscribe by sending a message to wpp-announce-subscribe@egroups.com.
For unsubscribing simply send a message to wpp-announce-unsubscribe@egroups.com.

wpp-devel

WPP developers mailing list. Here you can send your feature requests, bug reports, patches, ...

If this form doesn't work you can subscribe by sending a message to wpp-devel-subscribe@egroups.com.
For unsubscribing simply send a message to wpp-devel-unsubscribe@egroups.com.

If you have some troubles and those forms don't work mail me everything at lm@geocities.com

Why using WPP?

I've written WPP insipred by cpp (the C preprocessor). The cpp and m4 are a couple of preprocessor available for almost every system but the syntax of them is quite undistinguishable inside a text/html source.
The prototype for WPP was written in awk and it can do only templates inclusion and few other things, then I've started studing perl and so WPP became what you're seeing.
The @ delimiter was taken from autoconf while looking inside the config.status files.

Installing WPP

Just copy the script named wpp into some convenient directory in your PATH (i.e. /usr/local/bin). You should probably put this file somewhere safe in case you want to refer to it later.
You may need to change the first row of the wpp script in order to match the correct path for your perl interpreter.

Known bugs

Actually WPP cannot check for recursive template inclusion (while 1.34 do that) or macro call, this stuff will be fixed as soon as possible.

Contacting the author

If you find a problem with this program or you would like to make a suggestion, or whatever, feel free to e-mail me at lm@geocities.com

Thanks!

My thanks go to the following people for submitting feedback and/or code. Apologies to anyone I have forgotten (send me an e-mail!).

• Luca Sironi (Luca_).
• Fancesco Chemolli (Kinkie).
• Matteo Sala (Ares).
• Jean-Pierre Malisse, who sent me some suggestions that pushed me in writing the multi line macros feature of WPP ;)
• Matteo Flora (Last Knight), he discovered that VIM (VI iMproved) + WPP can be better than MS FrontPad and that the trashcan may be the best place for the last one. ;P
• Bastian Kleineidam, who discovered and fixed a missing tail inclusion bug. ;)
• Colin Turnbull (CT), let me notice that removing empty lines is bad behaviour for <PRE> formatted stuff. He also asked for macro expansion into variables assigments and macro arguments ... done! ;)
• Michelangelo Grigni for some interesting suggestions.
• Matt Massie, another who catched the <PRE> bug of wpp 2.00 - 2.01.
• Andreas Forsgren said: "WPP is *great* *great* *great*, I love it! Thank *you* for making it." ... then requested an enhancement for the @IF@ ;)
• Stefano Strada (Harlock).
• Roberto Flora, who used WPP for the web site Ordine Agronomi e Forestali di Bergamo.
• Jiri Rubes, who reported and fixed a problem with wpp 2.09 running in some environments that don't set PWD.