I was writing a long-ish tutorial about how to use LibraryCloud that refers to bunches of Javascript. I wanted a way to refer to that code in the HTML document. So I wrote a converter that turns Javascript code (and maybe others) into HTML tables you can just plunk into your document.

Here’s an example of some code:

function init(){
// get textarea to accept tab key
// thank you http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6140632/how-to-handle-tab-in-textarea
	$("#rawjs").keydown(function(e) {
		if(e.keyCode === 9) { // tab was pressed
			// get caret position/selection
			var start = this.selectionStart;
			var end = this.selectionEnd;

			var $this = $(this);
			var value = $this.val();

			// set textarea value to: text before caret + tab + text after caret
			$this.val(value.substring(0, start)
						+ "\t"
						+ value.substring(end));

			// put caret at right position again (add one for the tab)
			this.selectionStart = this.selectionEnd = start + 1;

			// prevent the focus lose
			e.preventDefault();
		}
	});
}

And here’s what it looks like once converted into an HTML table:

There’s definitely some clunkiness to this. For example, if you click on the “toggle line numbers” button it hides or shows the line numbers for every such table in your document. (I’ll fix this eventually.) By the way, the “Toggle” button is there so your readers can select the code and not get the lline numbers.

Also, in order to get the formatting totally encapsulated within your document, I clunkily add a “<style>” section before each table. I couldn’t figure out any other way to do it without making your HTML document dependent on my server being up.

The utility is here: http://hyperorg.com/programs/convertJStoTable/convertJStoTable.html. The code itself is up at Github (but not quite up to date at the moment).

Please let me know all the ways it’s broken and sucks, although I don’t promise to do anything about it. It worked for me.

Categories: programs dw