Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
1–10 of 34 posts
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#2Or there's the opposite choice of using PHP as a C preprocessors. Not sure which is more frightening.
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#3Seems like a bad idea, given that the CPP and HTML have a fair number of overlapping tokens (e.g. `#` for both URL fragments and macro beginnings).
Why not use SSI[1]? It's inspired by the CPP's syntax, but is supported directly by most HTTP servers (and is more powerful, to boot).
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#4I was considering doing something like this just the other day. It had a gnuplot script and it seemed to me that it would be so much more versatile if I could use #ifdefine and #include in it.
I ended up using a Perl preprocessor, but it seems like cpp would work ok-ish for certain use cases that don’t require, say, strict tabs like Python among a few other things mentioned on the cpp manual.
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#5Why not go all out? Use -DUSERNAME=$USERNAME on the command line to pass in data? Define macros with parameters to affect rendering in complicated ways. Call cpp for every request to generate the html. Could be fun!
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#6IIRC the earliest version of the C++ language, before a C++ compiler existed, was implemented with C and the M4 preprocessor.
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#7Seems like a bad idea, given that the CPP and HTML have a fair number of overlapping tokens (e.g. `#` for both URL fragments and macro beginnings). Why not use SSI[1]? It's inspired by the CPP's syntax, but is supported directly by most HTTP servers (and is more powerful, to boot). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
# is only processed by cpp when it's the first non-whitespace character in a line so that shouldn't be an issue in the real world. But, yeah, SSI.
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#8I was considering doing something like this just the other day. It had a gnuplot script and it seemed to me that it would be so much more versatile if I could use #ifdefine and #include in it. I ended up using a Perl preprocessor, but it seems like cpp would work ok-ish for certain use cases that don’t require, say, strict tabs like Python among a few other things mentioned on the cpp manual.
Check out https://github.com/logological/gpp it's what I use when I feel like I need a preprocessor. It's more flexible in syntax and operation than cpp.
I've used it in the past for wrangling the definitions of a multitude of SQL triggers I was using to generate a real-time materialized view. The fact that you can modify its syntax is very helpful for making it work with non-C syntaxes (like SQL or even LaTeX).
It even has an HTML mode built-in, which you can customize to your needs, but looks like:
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#9Seems like a bad idea, given that the CPP and HTML have a fair number of overlapping tokens (e.g. `#` for both URL fragments and macro beginnings). Why not use SSI[1]? It's inspired by the CPP's syntax, but is supported directly by most HTTP servers (and is more powerful, to boot). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes
# is only processed by cpp when it's the first non-whitespace character in a line so that shouldn't be an issue in the real world. But, yeah, SSI.
True. Maybe would have been better examples, although one could argue those are optional :-)
Re: Using the C preprocessor as an HTML templating engine
#10There's also the htp processor that handles the same problem. It has macros (equivalent to #define) file inclusion (equivalent to #include) and conditionals (equivalent to #ifxxx) but is better suited for HTML than the C preprocessor.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/htp/