Re: first help sentence truncated

[Dmitri A. Sergatskov]

I think we should also put a limit on max string length to avoid possible DoS

(intentional or not) / web page corruption, if regex is not found.

Dmitri.

On Mon, Aug 27, 2018 at 12:29 PM Rik <address@hidden> wrote:

Assuming moving to a two-space convention to end sentences, this regular _expression_ will work

regexp (help_text, '\.(?:\s\s|\n|$)', 'once')

--Rik

On 08/27/2018 10:11 AM, Rik wrote:

This is likely to be caused by get_first_help_sentence.m in Octave core.

With the following file b.m

--- File: b.m ---
## This plots x vs. y on a green background.

function b (x)
  disp ('hello');
endfunction
--- End File ---

get_first_help_sentence ("b.m") returns
ans =  This plots x vs.

The code is

  ## Extract first line by searching for a period followed by a space class
  ## character (to support periods in numbers or words) ...
  period_idx = regexp (help_text, '\.\s', "once");

One way to resolve this is to have a list of abbreviations as Oliver suggests.  This could get cumbersome though as we would probably not recognize a new abbreviation in the first sentence of help until somebody reported an error.  Another solution would be to require the convention (used in Octave core) that a sentence-ending period is followed by *two* spaces.  Then the regular _expression_ above could be modified to support this case.  This would work on all in-sentence abbreviations, and on phrases like "Plot Y vs. X on a semilog background.  The second help sentence".  A third possibility would be to re-write the documentation--either to expand the abbreviation like vs. to versus if length is not a problem, or to remove the abbreviation entirely.  For example, the existing semilogy documentation avoids using "vs." entirely and says "Produce a 2-D plot using a logarithmic scale for the y-axis."

--Rik

On 08/27/2018 09:00 AM, address@hidden wrote:

Subject:

Re: Octave-Forge: Redesign with responsive layout

From:

Oliver Heimlich <address@hidden>

Date:

08/26/2018 10:58 PM

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"Dmitri A. Sergatskov" <address@hidden>

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Hi Dmitri,

thank you for the observation. Please create a bug report in the category 'Octave Forge Package'. The extraction of the first help sentence happens in the package generate_html.

Fortunately, it doesn't happen very often. Maybe we can simply scan for common abbreviations to prevent it from happening.

Oliver

Am 27. August 2018 04:44:16 MESZ schrieb "Dmitri A. Sergatskov" <address@hidden>:

 

Looking at the Octave-Forge website I noticed that the description text of individual functions often gets trancated.

One of the most obvious examples is https://octave.sourceforge.io/data-smoothing/overview.html

yet the problem is widespread. (I assume the code that extract 1st sentence from the help gets tricked by the period in misc abbreviations.)

I could file a bug report but I do not see a proper Category.

Dmitri.

--