Your Wish is My Command

212

Chapter Eleven

Learning Repetitive Text-Editing Procedures with SMARTedit

~ , ~ The SMARTedit User Interface

We illustrate SMARTedit by showing how it automates a simple text-pro-

cessing task. Suppose the user has some HTML with comments embedded

in it and would like to remove the comment tags and all the text inside the

comments. An HTML comment is a string delineated by the tokens < !--and

-->. The comment may span multiple lines and contain arbitrary charac-

ters. To delete all such comments, a Microsoft Word user would have to en-

ter a regular expression of the form \ < \!--*--\ > into the search-and-replace ...