IFS and the read command
IFS and the read command
In order to (finally) get the .mdsh files to generate valid markdown, and from there to convert to valid HTML, while also preserving code block formatting (new lines, indentations, etc), I had to set IFS and use the -er options of the read command.
About IFS
The Internal Field Separator (IFS) that is used for word splitting after expansion and to split lines into words with the read builtin command.
The IFS variable is a special Bash/shell variable which commands like read use to workout what counts as a field separator.
By default, it is usually set to new lines and spaces.
In order to parse our the markdown generated from our .mdsh files, we set IFS to parse new lines only (ignoring spaces).
About the read command
The read command is built-in to bash, and used to read input from the terminal input, or stdin.
In order to read the markdown we generated line by line, while also preserving formatting, we need to set IFS as described above, and to set the -er params for rread so that backslashes are interpreted literally.
After doing that, these paras you're reading will be converted to p tags in the HTML, and the code blocks will preserve their formatting too.
See previous posts for examples of embedded code blocks for examples.