speck

Speck

Speck is a tool that allows you to extract text between <speck></speck> tags found within one or more files. It is agnostic to the format or extension of files used as input. The result of the combined extracted text is printed to stdout.

This might be useful, for example, for building documentation from special comments placed in your source code.

Installing

Requires Go 1.14+.

go build ./speck.go
sudo mv ./speck /usr/local/bin

How to use

Start with a file containing <speck></speck> tags within, such as the following main.go:

package main

/*
<speck>
# Hello World
</speck>
*/

import (
	"fmt"
)

func main() {
	/*
	<speck tab=1>
	This is a test.
	</speck>
	*/
	fmt.Println("hello world")
}

Then run speck, and direct the output to a file such as example.md:

speck main.go > example.md

The contents of example.md:

# Hello World

This is a test.

Notice the optional tab attribute, which will instruct Speck to trim x number of tabs from the left side of each line within a section.

Speck can also be used with multiple files, combining the output in order. You can also leverage shell globbing. Here is an example using some test files within this repo:

speck testdata/go-test-suite-example/*.go

which would be the same as running

speck testdata/go-test-suite-example/00_setup_test.go \
  testdata/go-test-suite-example/02_second_test.go \
  testdata/go-test-suite-example/01_first_test.go

Note on inner HTML

Sometimes you might want to document things like look like HTML tags. Here's an example using <name> to represent a URL part:

This is my API request: `POST /api/stuff/<name>`

This is supported, with the caveat that is must not be on the same line as the string "speck". As in, you can do this:

<speck>
This is my API request: `POST /api/stuff/<name>`
</speck>

but you cannot do this:

<speck>This is my API request: `POST /api/stuff/<name>`</speck>

Otherwise you will end up with <name> going missing in the output. This is needed due to HTML parsing madness.

The issue is demonstrated in the TestDisappearingTag test found in speck_test.go. If you can fix this, PRs are accepted by all means.