On this page you'll find GPL'd code and some blurb about the tiny project with the totally unrelated name Spatz, a bit of php code used to easily incorporate an area for announcements on a website.

Overview

Spatz is basically a parser for marked-up plain text. The user uploads a text file in a specified format, and the software generates clean XHTML1.0 Strict code representing the contents of the text file based on some sane assumptions and settings. By calling the spatz_generate_announcement() function, you generate a div-container with a fixed id of "spatz_announce" to format by using CSS. For details on the markup format and usage, please refer to the source file spatz-base.inc.php and example announcement file announce.txt enclosed in the current distribution package.

Files

Example

PRIMARY HEADING

This is some text with underscored words, some bold faced words, and even more text. In fact, it's also well possible to include bold faced words across a line break, as well as using underscored words. Both may be combined if you like, too.

Leaving a line empty between two paragraphs formats them accordingly.

SUB HEADINGS

Subheadings are supported, but only one level. Subheadings are enclosed with two asterisks directly before and after the heading itself. A normal heading uses three asterisks, and bold face is achieved by using single asterisks.

Five dashes after another in a single line will result in a horizontal ruler:

HYPERLINKS

To top things off, hyperlinks are available, too, and must be enclosed in angular brackets. A link to the Google Search Engine is a good example for that. You may also link without a name, which shows the URL directly: http://www.google.de.

A "mailto" link to include email addresses is handled separately like this: Email to herbrich@veloxis.de or Dennis Herbrich, respectively.

HTML

HTML can be used at any time, if the basic markup doesn't cut it.

Escaping

Right now, you can only use underscores and asterisks by including them as HTML escapes, like this * or this _. Alternatively, prefix those with a single backslash to avoid interpretation by Spatz, like _this_ or **this**.

Responsible for the contents of these pages (usually) is Dennis "Gyroplast" Herbrich, reachable by email at herbrich@veloxis.de.

This address is protected by an annoyingly picky spam filter, so make sure you don't send me HTML, attachments, or try to sell V14GRAAA!. I won't even see your mail.

Spatz - A PHP-based announcement engine