Question

I’m looking for very simple template script for building JS files. It should do only one thing: include one file to another.

Template (main.js)

/*> script.js */

var style = "/*> style.css */";

script.js

var my_script;

style.css

html, body {margin:0; padding:0}
.my-style {background: #fffacc}

Output

var my_script;

var style = "html, body {margin:0; padding:0}\
.my-style {background: #fffacc}";

---

I’ve made cat main.js | sed -e 's!/\*> \(.*\) \*/!cat \1!g'. Output from it:

cat script.js

var style = "cat style.css";

How make cat \1 actually work?

I will use it for building UserJS (Greasemonkey scripts). I’ve few JS and CSS files in my repository. I would like to keep them separate from each other. But result script must be only one, so I need merge all JS and CSS files to it.

I can use sed, awk, perl or ruby.

---

Finally, I’ve made js-preprocessor. Thanks guys!

Answer 1

What’s the intended use for this? JavaScript does not support multi-line strings, so your style variable definition will result in a syntax error after that template expansion.

Edit: my mistake – I missed that your example expansion included a \ continuation. This complicates the expansion process though; it would be good if you could go into some more detail about where you plan to use this, what tools you have available etc.

An example in Ruby:

ruby <main.js -pe'$_.gsub!(%r{/\*>\s*(.+?)\s*\*/}) { File.read($1) }'