David Raynes

As with other plugins , I've been meaning to write and release this one for quite some time, and I've only now actually done it. So, here is one of the most useful text parsing functions in Perl, wrapped in a Movable Type plugin: MTSplitLoop.

For those unfamiliar with the split function in Perl, here is the quick description taken from the split documentation page at Perldoc.com

Splits a string into a list of strings and returns that list.

In other words, given a string "A,B,C,D,E,F" and the pattern "," to split based on, split returns "A", "B", "C", "D", "E", and "F" so you can process each portion of that string by itself.

Download one of the following files, unpack it, and place splitloop.pl in your plugins/ directory.

• splitloop.tar.gz
• splitloop.zip

The following tags are available:

• MTSplitLoop: the main container tag that loops through each value in the list returned from the split function. It takes two arguments:
  • value: the string to be split. Can be in embeded MT Tag form (e.g. '[MTTag attr="something"]')
  • glue: the string or regular expression to split on. To split by regular expression, just format glue with slashes ('/') at the beginning and end (e.g. '/\d+/'). Defaults to ','.
• MTSplitLoopValue: the current value

Usage Example (with Brad's Key Values plugin):

<MTIfKeyExists key="files">
<p>File List</p>
<ul>
<MTSplitLoop value="[MTKeyValue key='files']">
<li><MTSplitLoopValue></li>
</MTSplitLoop>
</ul>
</MTIfKeyExists>