Rdoc markup question

#1

Is there a way to disable rdoc’s automatic cross referencing of method
names? I’ve got a method named ‘null’ but I don’t want every instance
of the word ‘null’ in the comments to be hyperlinked to the method
definition. I tried writing ‘\null’ or ‘n\ull’ but then the backslash
shows up in the comments.

Similarly I also found that when I have XML strings in the comments
I can either use “<!-- comment -->” and have the \ show up in the
comments
or have “” and have the rdoc parser die on me.

Any suggestions?

Gary W.

#2

On Apr 29, 8:52 pm, Gary W. removed_email_address@domain.invalid wrote:

Is there a way to disable rdoc’s automatic cross referencing of method
names? I’ve got a method named ‘null’ but I don’t want every instance
of the word ‘null’ in the comments to be hyperlinked to the method
definition. I tried writing ‘\null’ or ‘n\ull’ but then the backslash
shows up in the comments.

Nope. I brought this up at
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google/browse_frm/thread/9379ed6b1c907f17/82b5df7ee399b70d?#82b5df7ee399b70d

I find it annoying, too.

Similarly I also found that when I have XML strings in the comments
I can either use “<!-- comment -->” and have the \ show up in the
comments
or have “” and have the rdoc parser die on me.

Sounds like a bug to me. Please report it.

Regards,

Dan

#3

On Apr 30, 2007, at 12:00 AM, Daniel B. wrote:

Nope. I brought this up at
http://groups.google.com/group/ruby-talk-google/browse_frm/thread/
9379ed6b1c907f17/82b5df7ee399b70d?#82b5df7ee399b70d

I find it annoying, too.

I read that thread. I think the default heuristic is ok. In the
thread you suggested an explicit syntax to trigger the cross-reference.
I’d suggest an explicit syntax to disable the cross-reference.

I could of course come up with a patch but even if adopted it would
take a while to propagate through the Ruby ecosystem. I was hoping
there was a trick or hack of some sort.

I see that this issue is actually entered into the the tracker for rdoc
as issue 9316. There are quite a few unresolved issues in the list…

Gary W.

#4

On Apr 30, 2007, at 12:00 AM, Daniel B. wrote:

On Apr 29, 8:52 pm, Gary W. removed_email_address@domain.invalid wrote:

Similarly I also found that when I have XML strings in the comments
I can either use “<!-- comment -->” and have the \ show up in the
comments
or have “” and have the rdoc parser die on me.

Sounds like a bug to me. Please report it.

I’ve entered this into the tracker for rdoc (#10474):

In markup/simple_markup/inline.rb:

  add_special(/<!--(.*?)-->/, :COMMENT)

marks an XML comment to be given special handling but the method
handle_special_COMMENT
is never defined. This causes an unhandled exception when the HTML
generator runs:

/opt/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rdoc/markup/simple_markup/to_html.rb:230:in
`convert_special’: Unhandled special: Special: type=17,
text="" (RuntimeError)

I’m not sure if the intent was to insert the XML comment into the
generated XHTML or to
escape the comment so that it appeared as readable text.

The following code illustrates the problem:

class A

The line below is OK because it is processed as a 
 block:

def method1
end

The line below is OK because it is protected by the .

<!-- comment–>

def method2
end

The line below is OK because it doesn’t match any markup patterns

some text

def method4
end

The line below is not OK because the handler for the :COMMENT

pattern

is not defined:

def method3
end

end

Gary W.