[dev] Possible replacement for Text_Filter_BBCode

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

Quoting Stephan Hohmann <webmaster at dasourcerer.net>:

> Good point. Actually there is little gain for simple texts.
> The parser comes with a pretty good recognition for free standing  
> links. Also,
> we've had a solid record of smileys being parsed within links thus resulting
> into inaccessible links. Especially :) and :D showed to be a  
> problem. Since this
> parser understands what parts of the text should be inspected for  
> smileys, this
> doesn't happen.
>
> One problem I came across with preg_replace based parsers has been  
> that there is a limit concerning how far a tag can span. I have to  
> admit, it takes a few thousend characters. But it happens. This  
> parser doesn't have this issue as the
> matches are not spanning. Also, large matches are very, very, very  
> expensive to
> process. Just try it out yourself: Take a [url=...] tag and toss in  
> a few kb of
> characters before closing it. This parser doesn't suffer from this problem.
>
> Then, since the parser is designed to be quickly expandable, it is  
> in comparison
> very flexible. The parser itself doesn't really know the tags and  
> only follows
> the following assumptions:
>   - Tagnames are not to be handled case sensitive. All of the  
> following examples
>     are treated equally:
>      [b]foo[/b], [b]foo[/B], [B]foo[/b], [B]foo[/B]
>   - Every tag starts with [ and ends with ]
>   - Every tag can have an optional parameter
> Everything else - including text transformations - is handled by the assigned
> classes within the parse tree. See the [code] tag for a good example.
>
> So, to conclude this: This parser is overweight for simple  
> operations. However,
> it is the best solution so far for complex tasks such as resolving heavily
> nested tags etc (apart from the PECL bbcode extension).

Okay, well, if you're willing to assign the copyright to the Horde  
Project, go ahead and create a ticket on bugs.horde.org with the code  
and any necessary changes. Tests would be great and would certainly be  
in its favor. Otherwise I suggest you release your code as an  
independent PEAR package...

Best,
-chuck