Re: man(7), hyphen, and minus

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi Branden,

> >     # Get a count of the number of lines before the first blank line, which
> >     # we'll pass to .Vb as its parameter.  This tells *roff to keep that 
> > many
> >     # lines together.  We don't want to tell *roff to keep huge blocks
> >     # together.
> >     my @lines = split (m{ \n }xms, $text);
> >     my $unbroken = 0;
> >     for my $line (@lines) {
> >         last if $line =~ m{ \A \s* \z }xms;
> >         $unbroken++;
> >     }
> >     if ($unbroken > 12) {
> >         $unbroken = 10;
> >     }
...
> Well, you can throw away that line counting logic in Perl altogether
> and simply use `ne` _before_ EX (not EE).

I think the code is counting the number of lines in the first
‘paragraph’ although I find it misleading given it uses \A and \z with
//ms on a string which will only contain one line.

If that's its aim then it would be simpler to just count the number of
leading non-blank lines.

    $ for s in '' $'\n' $'a\n' $'a\na\n' $'a\n\n' $'a\n\na\n'; do
    >     perl -n0777e '$n = () = /\G^.*\S.*\n/mg; print "$n\n"' <<<"$s"
    > done
    0
    0
    1
    2
    1
    1
    $ 

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.