From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:14:36 GMT
Subject: Re: [PATCH] gitweb: Better chopping in commit search results
Message-ID: <7voda8ap6r.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080222163035.5942.93410.stgit@localhost.localdomain>

Jakub Narebski <jnareb@gmail.com> writes:

> From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
> Subject: [PATCH] gitweb: Better chopping in commit search results
>
> When searching commit messages (commit search), if matched string is
> too long, the generated HTML was munged leading to an ill-formed XHTML
> document.
>
> Now gitweb chop leading, trailing and matched parts, HTML escapes
> those parts, then composes and marks up match info.  HTML output is
> never chopped.  Limiting matched info to 80 columns (with slop) is now
> done by dividing remaining characters after chopping match equally to
> leading and trailing part, not by chopping composed and HTML marked
> output.

Could somebody test this with very long search string, as that
was how the issue initially came up, to see (1) if it really
fixes the "mark-up chopped in the middle" issue, (2) and how the
actual output looks like?

Regarding the latter, I have a slight suspicion that chopping
the tail of the middle part and showing very little context may
not produce a very useful output.

For example, if you are looking for "very long ... and how"
in the first paragraph of message (if it were all on a single
line), wouldn't you want to see:

    ...st this with <<very long ... and how>> the actual out...

rather than:

    Could som... <<very long search stri...>> the actual out...

in the result?

That is, it any chopping ever needs to happen, I suspect a more
useful way to shorten the output would be to:

 - divide the available space to give enough space to give
   context for head and tail part.

 - chop head from the left, if needed, with leading ellipsis;

 - chop tail from the right, if needed, with trailing ellipsis;

 - chop search string from both ends, if needed, with leading
   and trailing ellipses.

Hmm?