Abstract
There are plenty of Lisp Markup Languages out there - every Lisp programmer seems to write at least one during his career - and CL-WHO (where WHO means "with-html-output" for want of a better acronym) is probably just as good or bad as the next one. They are all more or less similar in that they provide convenient means to convert S-expressions intermingled with code into (X)HTML, XML, or whatever but differ with respect to syntax, implementation, and API. So, if you haven't made a choice yet, check out the alternatives as well before you begin to use CL-WHO just because it was the first one you came across. (Was that repelling enough?) If you're looking for a slightly different approach you might also want to look at HTML-TEMPLATE.I wrote this one in 2002 although at least Tim Bradshaw's htout and AllegroServe's HTML generation facilities by John Foderaro of Franz Inc. were readily available. Actually, I don't remember why I had to write my own library - maybe just because it was fun and didn't take very long. The syntax was obviously inspired by htout although it is slightly different.
CL-WHO tries to create efficient code in that it makes constant strings as long as possible. In other words, the code generated by the CL-WHO macros will usually be a sequence of
WRITE-STRING
forms for constant parts of the output interspersed with arbitrary code inserted by the user of the macro. CL-WHO will make sure that there aren't two adjacentWRITE-STRING
forms with constant strings - see examples below. CL-WHO's output is either XHTML (default) or 'plain' (SGML) HTML — depending on what you've setHTML-MODE
to.CL-WHO is intended to be portable and should work with all conforming Common Lisp implementations. Let us know if you encounter any problems.
It comes with a BSD-style license so you can basically do with it whatever you want.
CL-WHO is for example used by clutu and Heike Stephan.
Download shortcut: http://weitz.de/files/cl-who.tar.gz.
with-html-output
with-html-output-to-string
show-html-expansion
*attribute-quote-char*
*prologue*
*html-empty-tag-aware-p*
*html-empty-tags*
*downcase-tokens-p*
esc
fmt
htm
str
html-mode
escape-string
escape-char
*escape-char-p*
escape-string-minimal
escape-string-minimal-plus-quotes
escape-string-iso-8859
escape-string-iso-8859-1
escape-string-all
escape-char-minimal
escape-char-minimal-plus-quotes
escape-char-iso-8859-1
escape-char-all
conc
convert-tag-to-string-list
convert-attributes
*HTTP-STREAM*
is the stream your web
application is supposed to write to. Here are some contrived code snippets
together with the Lisp code generated by CL-WHO and the resulting HTML output.
(with-html-output (*http-stream*) (loop for (link . title) in '(("http://zappa.com/" . "Frank Zappa") ("http://marcusmiller.com/" . "Marcus Miller") ("http://www.milesdavis.com/" . "Miles Davis")) do (htm (:a :href link (:b (str title))) :br))) |
Frank Zappa Marcus Miller Miles Davis |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
;; Code generated by CL-WHO (let ((*http-stream* *http-stream*)) (progn nil (loop for (link . title) in '(("http://zappa.com/" . "Frank Zappa") ("http://marcusmiller.com/" . "Marcus Miller") ("http://www.milesdavis.com/" . "Miles Davis")) do (progn (write-string "<a href='" *http-stream*) (princ link *http-stream*) (write-string "'><b>" *http-stream*) (princ title *http-stream*) (write-string "</b></a><br />" *http-stream*))))) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
(with-html-output (*http-stream*) (:table :border 0 :cellpadding 4 (loop for i below 25 by 5 do (htm (:tr :align "right" (loop for j from i below (+ i 5) do (htm (:td :bgcolor (if (oddp j) "pink" "green") (fmt "~@R" (1+ j)))))))))) |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
;; Code generated by CL-WHO (let ((*http-stream* *http-stream*)) (progn nil (write-string "<table border='0' cellpadding='4'>" *http-stream*) (loop for i below 25 by 5 do (progn (write-string "<tr align='right'>" *http-stream*) (loop for j from i below (+ i 5) do (progn (write-string "<td bgcolor='" *http-stream*) (princ (if (oddp j) "pink" "green") *http-stream*) (write-string "'>" *http-stream*) (format *http-stream* "~@r" (1+ j)) (write-string "</td>" *http-stream*))) (write-string "</tr>" *http-stream*))) (write-string "</table>" *http-stream*))) |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
(with-html-output (*http-stream*) (:h4 "Look at the character entities generated by this example") (loop for i from 0 for string in '("Fête" "Sørensen" "naïve" "Hühner" "Straße") do (htm (:p :style (conc "background-color:" (case (mod i 3) ((0) "red") ((1) "orange") ((2) "blue"))) (htm (esc string)))))) |
Look at the character entities generated by this exampleFête Sørensen naïve Hühner Straße |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
;; Code generated by CL-WHO (let ((*http-stream* *http-stream*)) (progn nil (write-string "<h4>Look at the character entities generated by this example</h4>" *http-stream*) (loop for i from 0 for string in '("Fête" "Sørensen" "naïve" "Hühner" "Straße") do (progn (write-string "<p style='" *http-stream*) (princ (conc "background-color:" (case (mod i 3) ((0) "red") ((1) "orange") ((2) "blue"))) *http-stream*) (write-string "'>" *http-stream*) (progn (write-string (escape-string string) *http-stream*)) (write-string "</p>" *http-stream*))))) |
The preferred method to compile and load CL-WHO is via ASDF.
If you're on Debian you can probably use the cl-who Debian package which is available thanks to Kevin Rosenberg. There's also a port for Gentoo Linux thanks to Matthew Kennedy. In both cases, check if they have the newest version available.
Luís Oliveira maintains a darcs
repository of CL-WHO
at http://common-lisp.net/~loliveira/ediware/.
If you want to send patches, please read this first.
WITH-HTML-OUTPUT
, which
transforms the body of code it encloses into something else obeying the
following rules (which we'll call transformation rules) for the body's forms:
"foo" => (write-string "foo" s) |
(:br) => (write-string "<br />" s) |
HTML-MODE
set to :SGML
an empty element is written this way:
(:br) => (write-string "<br>" s) |
NIL
.) The form denoting the attribute's value will be treated as follows. (Note that the behaviour with respect to attributes is incompatible with versions earlier than 0.3.0!)
(:td :bgcolor "red") => (write-string "<td bgcolor='red' />" s) |
T
and HTML-MODE
is :XML
(default) the attribute's value will be the attribute's name (following XHTML convention to denote attributes which don't have a value in HTML).
(:td :nowrap t) => (write-string "<td nowrap='nowrap' />" s) |
HTML-MODE
set to :SGML
:
(:td :nowrap t) => (write-string "<td nowrap>" s) |
NIL
the attribute will be left out completely.
(:td :nowrap nil) => (write-string "<td />" s) |
"~A"
at macro expansion time.
(:table :border 3) => (write-string "<table border='3' />" s) |
PRINC
unless the value is T
or NIL
which will be treated as above. (It is the application developer's job to provide the correct printer control variables.)
;; simplified example, see function CHECKBOX below ;; note that this form is not necessarily CONSTANTP in all Lisps (:table :border (+ 1 2)) => (write-string "<table border='" s) (princ (+ 1 2) s) (write-string "' />" s) |
(:table :border 0 :cellpadding 5 :cellspacing 5) => (write-string "<table border='0' cellpadding='5' cellspacing='5' />" s) |
(:p "Paragraph") => (write-string "<p>Paragraph</p>" s) (:p :class "foo" "Paragraph") => (write-string "<p class='foo'>Paragraph</p>" s) (:p :class "foo" "One" " " "long" " " "sentence") => (write-string "<p class='foo'>One long sentence</p>" s) (:p :class "foo" "Visit " (:a :href "http://www.cliki.net/" "CLiki")) => (write-string "<p class='foo'>Visit <a href='http://www.cliki.net/'>CLiki</a></p>" s) |
((:p) "Paragraph") => (write-string "<p>Paragraph</p>" s) ((:p :class "foo") "Paragraph") => (write-string "<p class='foo'>Paragraph</p>" s) ((:p :class "foo" :name "humpty-dumpty") "One" " " "long" " " "sentence") => (write-string "<p class='foo' name='humpty-dumpty'>One long sentence</p>" s) ((:p :class "foo") "Visit " ((:a :href "http://www.cliki.net/") "CLiki")) => (write-string "<p class='foo'>Visit <a href='http://www.cliki.net/'>CLiki</a></p>" s) |
* (defun checkbox (stream name checked &optional value) (with-html-output (stream) (:input :type "checkbox" :name name :checked checked :value value))) CHECKBOX * (with-output-to-string (s) (checkbox s "foo" t)) "<input type='checkbox' name='foo' checked='checked' />" * (with-output-to-string (s) (checkbox s "foo" nil)) "<input type='checkbox' name='foo' />" * (with-output-to-string (s) (checkbox s "foo" nil "bar")) "<input type='checkbox' name='foo' value='bar' />" * (with-output-to-string (s) (checkbox s "foo" t "bar")) "<input type='checkbox' name='foo' checked='checked' value='bar' />"
:hr => (write-string "<hr />" s) |
(str form1 form*)
will be substituted with
(let ((result form1)) (when result (princ result s)))
. form1
are ignored.)
(loop for i below 10 do (str i)) => (loop for i below 10 do (let ((#:result i)) (when #:result (princ #:result *standard-output*)))) |
(fmt form*)
will be substituted with (format s form*)
.
(loop for i below 10 do (fmt "~R" i)) => (loop for i below 10 do (format s "~R" i)) |
(esc form1 form*)
will be substituted with
(let ((result form1)) (when result (write-string (escape-string result s))))
.
(htm form*)
then each of the forms
will be subject to the transformation rules we're just describing.
(loop for i below 100 do (htm (:b "foo") :br)) => (loop for i below 100 do (progn (write-string "<b>foo</b><br />" s))) |
:foobar
instead of :hr
.
[Macro]
with-html-output (var &optional stream &key prologue indent) declaration* form* => result*
This is the main macro of CL-WHO. It will transform its body by the transformation rules described in Syntax and Semantics such that the output generated is sent to the stream denoted byvar
andstream
.var
must be a symbol. Ifstream
isNIL
it is assumed thatvar
is already bound to a stream, ifstream
is notNIL
var
will be bound to the formstream
which will be evaluated at run time.prologue
should be a string (orNIL
for the empty string which is the default) which is guaranteed to be the first thing sent to the stream from within the body of this macro. Ifprologue
isT
the prologue string is the value of*PROLOGUE*
. CL-WHO will usually try not to insert any unnecessary whitespace in order to save bandwidth. However, ifindent
is true line breaks will be inserted and nested tags will be indented properly. The value ofindent
- if it is an integer - will be taken as the initial indentation. If it is not an integer it is assumed to mean0
. (But note that indentation might change the semantics of the generated HTML. This is for example the case for thePRE
andTEXTAREA
tags, and in certain situations additional whitespace might also change the layout of tables.) Theresults
are the values returned by theforms
.Note that the keyword arguments
prologue
andindent
are used at macro expansion time.* (with-html-output (*standard-output* nil :prologue t) (:html (:body "Not much there")) (values)) <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"><html><body>Not much there</body></html> * (with-html-output (*standard-output*) (:html (:body :bgcolor "white" "Not much there")) (values)) <html><body bgcolor='white'>Not much there</body></html> * (with-html-output (*standard-output* nil :prologue t :indent t) (:html (:body :bgcolor "white" "Not much there")) (values)) <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> <html> <body bgcolor='white'> Not much there </body> </html>
This is just a thin wrapper aroundWITH-HTML-OUTPUT
. Indeed, the wrapper is so thin that the best explanation probably is to show its definition:(defmacro with-html-output-to-string ((var &optional string-form &key (element-type 'character) prologue indent) &body body) "Transform the enclosed BODY consisting of HTML as s-expressions into Lisp code which creates the corresponding HTML as a string." `(with-output-to-string (,var ,string-form :elementy-type ,element-type) (with-html-output (,var nil :prologue ,prologue :indent ,indent) ,@body)))Note that theresults
of this macro are determined by the behaviour ofWITH-OUTPUT-TO-STRING
.
[Macro]
show-html-expansion (var &optional stream &key prologue indent) declaration* form* => <no values>
This macro is intended for debugging purposes. It'll print to*STANDARD-OUTPUT*
the code which would have been generated byWITH-HTML-OUTPUT
had it been invoked with the same arguments.* (show-html-expansion (s) (:html (:body :bgcolor "white" (:table (:tr (dotimes (i 5) (htm (:td :align "left" (str i))))))))) (LET ((S S)) (PROGN (WRITE-STRING "<html><body bgcolor='white'><table><tr>" S) (DOTIMES (I 5) (PROGN (WRITE-STRING "<td align='left'>" S) (PRINC I S) (WRITE-STRING "</td>" S))) (WRITE-STRING "</tr></table></body></html>" S)))
[Special variable]
*attribute-quote-char*
This character is used as the quote character when building attributes. Defaults to the single quote#\'
. Only other reasonable character is the double quote#\"
.
[Special variable]
*prologue*
This is the prologue string which will be printed if theprologue
keyword argument toWITH-HTML-OUTPUT
isT
. Gets changed when you setHTML-MODE
. Its initial value is"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd\">"
[Special variable]
*html-empty-tag-aware-p*
Set this toNIL
to if you want to use CL-WHO as a strict XML generator. Otherwise, CL-WHO will only write empty tags listed in*HTML-EMPTY-TAGS*
as<tag/>
(XHTML mode) or<tag>
(SGML mode). For all other tags, it will always generate<tag></tag>
. The initial value of this variable isT
.
[Special variable]
*html-empty-tags*
The list of HTML tags that should be output as empty tags. See*HTML-EMPTY-TAG-AWARE-P*
. The initial value is the list(:area :atop :audioscope :base :basefont :br :choose :col :frame :hr :img :input :isindex :keygen :left :limittext :link :meta :nextid :of :over :param :range :right :spacer :spot :tab :wbr)
[Special variable]
*downcase-tokens-p*
If the value of this variable isNIL
, keyword symbols representing a tag or attribute name will not be automatically converted to lowercase. This is useful when one needs to output case sensitive XML. The default isT
.
[Symbol]
esc
[Symbol]
fmt
[Symbol]
htm
[Symbol]
str
These are just symbols with no bindings associated with them. The only reason they are exported is their special meaning during the transformations described in Syntax and Semantics.
[Accessor]
html-mode => mode
(setf (html-mode) mode)
The functionHTML-MODE
returns the current mode for generating HTML. The default is:XML
for XHTML. You can change this by setting it with(SETF (HTML-MODE) :SGML)
to pre-XML HTML mode.Setting it to SGML HTML sets the
*prologue*
to the doctype string for HTML 4.01 transitional:<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">Code generation in SGML HTML is slightly different from XHTML - there's no need to end empty elements with/>
and empty attributes are allowed.
[Function]
escape-string string &key test => escaped-string
This function will accept a stringstring
and will replace every character for whichtest
returns true with its character entity. The numeric character entities use decimal instead of hexadecimal values whenHTML-MODE
is set to:SGML
because of compatibility reasons with old clients.test
must be a function of one argument which accepts a character and returns a generalized boolean. The default is the value of*ESCAPE-CHAR-P*
. Note theESC
shortcut described in Syntax and Semantics.* (escape-string "<Hühner> 'naïve'") "<Hühner> 'naïve'" * (with-html-output-to-string (s) (:b (esc "<Hühner> 'naïve'"))) "<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN\" \"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd\"<b><Hühner> 'naïve'</b>"
[Function]
escape-char character &key test => escaped-string
This function works identical toESCAPE-STRING
, except that it operates on characters instead of strings.
[Special variable]
*escape-char-p*
This is the default for thetest
keyword argument toESCAPE-STRING
andESCAPE-CHAR
. Its initial value is#'(lambda (char) (or (find char "<>&'\"") (> (char-code char) 127)))
[Function]
escape-string-minimal string => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-string-minimal-plus-quotes string => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-string-iso-8859-1 string => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-string-iso-8859 string => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-string-all string => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-char-minimal character => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-char-minimal-plus-quotes character => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-char-iso-8859-1 character => escaped-string
[Function]
escape-char-all character => escaped-string
These are convenience function based onESCAPE-STRING
andESCAPE-CHAR
. The string functions are defined in a way similar to this one:(defun escape-string-minimal (string) "Escape only #\<, #\>, and #\& in STRING." (escape-string string :test #'(lambda (char) (find char "<>&")))) (defun escape-string-minimal-plus-quotes (string) "Like ESCAPE-STRING-MINIMAL but also escapes quotes." (escape-string string :test #'(lambda (char) (find char "<>&'\"")))) (defun escape-string-iso-8859-1 (string) "Escapes all characters in STRING which aren't defined in ISO-8859-1." (escape-string string :test #'(lambda (char) (or (find char "<>&'\"") (> (char-code char) 255))))) (defun escape-string-iso-8859 (string) "Identical to ESCAPE-STRING-ISO-8859-1. Kept for backward compatibility." (escape-string-iso-8859-1 string)) (defun escape-string-all (string) "Escapes all characters in STRING which aren't in the 7-bit ASCII character set." (escape-string string :test #'(lambda (char) (or (find char "<>&'\"") (> (char-code char) 127)))))The character functions are defined in an analogous manner.
[Function]
conc &rest string-list => string
Utility function to concatenate all arguments (which should be strings) into one string. Meant to be used mainly with attribute values.* (conc "This" " " "is" " " "a" " " "sentence") "This is a sentence" * (with-html-output-to-string (s) (:div :style (conc "padding:" (format nil "~A" (+ 3 2))) "Foobar")) "<div style='padding:5'>Foobar</div>"
[Generic Function]
convert-tag-to-string-list tag attr-list body body-fn => strings-or-forms
This function exposes some of CL-WHO's internals so users can customize its behaviour. It is called whenever a tag is processed and must return a corresponding list of strings or Lisp forms. The idea is that you can specialize this generic function in order to process certain tags yourself.
tag
is a keyword symbol naming the outer tag,attr-list
is an alist of its attributes (the car is the attribute's name as a keyword, the cdr is its value),body
is the tag's body, andbody-fn
is a function which should be applied to the body to further process it. Of course, if you define your own methods you can ignorebody-fn
if you want.Here are some simple examples:
* (defmethod convert-tag-to-string-list ((tag (eql :red)) attr-list body body-fn) (declare (ignore attr-list)) (nconc (cons "<font color='red'>" (funcall body-fn body)) (list "</font>"))) ; Compiling LAMBDA (PCL::.PV-CELL. PCL::.NEXT-METHOD-CALL. TAG ATTR-LIST BODY BODY-FN): ; Compiling Top-Level Form: #<STANDARD-METHOD CONVERT-TAG-TO-STRING-LIST ((EQL :RED) T T T) {582B268D}> * (with-html-output (*standard-output*) (:red (:b "Bold and red")) (values)) <font color='red'><b>Bold and red</b></font> * (show-html-expansion (s) (:red :style "spiffy" (if (foo) (htm "Attributes are ignored")))) (LET ((S S)) (PROGN NIL (WRITE-STRING "<font color='red'>" S) (IF (FOO) (PROGN (WRITE-STRING "Attributes are ignored" S))) (WRITE-STRING "</font>" S))) * (defmethod convert-tag-to-string-list ((tag (eql :table)) attr-list body body-fn) (cond ((cdr (assoc :simple attr-list)) (nconc (cons "<table" (convert-attributes (remove :simple attr-list :key #'car))) (list ">") (loop for row in body collect "<tr>" nconc (loop for col in row collect "<td>" when (constantp col) collect (format nil "~A" col) else collect col collect "</td>") collect "</tr>") (list "</table>"))) (t ;; you could as well invoke CALL-NEXT-METHOD here, of course (nconc (cons "<table " (convert-attributes attr-list)) (list ">") (funcall body-fn body) (list "</table>"))))) ; Compiling LAMBDA (PCL::.PV-CELL. PCL::.NEXT-METHOD-CALL. TAG ATTR-LIST BODY BODY-FN): ; Compiling Top-Level Form: #<STANDARD-METHOD CONVERT-TAG-TO-STRING-LIST ((EQL :TABLE) T T T) {58AFB7CD}> * (with-html-output (*standard-output*) (:table :border 0 (:tr (:td "1") (:td "2")) (:tr (:td "3") (:td "4")))) <table border='0'><tr><td>1</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>4</td></tr></table> "</td></tr></table>" * (show-html-expansion (s) (:table :simple t :border 0 (1 2) (3 (fmt "Result = ~A" (compute-result))))) (LET ((S S)) (PROGN NIL (WRITE-STRING "<table border='0'><tr><td>1</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>3</td><td>" S) (FORMAT S "Result = ~A" (COMPUTE-RESULT)) (WRITE-STRING "</td></tr></table>" S)))
[Function]
convert-attributes attr-list => strings-or-forms
This is a helper function which can be called fromCONVERT-TAG-TO-STRING-LIST
to process the list of attributes.
$Header: /usr/local/cvsrep/cl-who/doc/index.html,v 1.63 2008/03/27 23:16:49 edi Exp $