> Thank you for the updated code.  I had an implmentation question about
> one part:

> >                 s = buf[-1]
> >                 if s and s.isspace() and s.find("\n") < 0:

> I usually try to avoid str.find() in algorithms whenever possible.  I
> did some debug logging and it looked like buf[-1] was always some
> number of spaces or '\n'.  Would there ever be a newline inside the
> middle of the string?  If not, I'd like to use:

> if s and s.isspace() and s[-1] != '\n':

> > I think that it is very hard to control indents accurately
> > in Tenjin approach. To controll them, it is necessary to
> > parse Python statements and detect block correctly, like
> > Mako or Django does. But it makes Tenjin more complex and
> > heavy, so I wouldn't do that.
> > I'm sorry but I recommend to compromise at some level.

> I know it is a selfish perspective, but I would really like it if
> Tenjin would detect blocks correctly similar to Mako.  Having moved
> from django to pytenjin for performance reasons, I can understand not
> wanting slow tenjin down too much.  I agree that finding a compromise
> would be a good thing.

> May I suggest three aspects of what I would consider an ideal
> compromise:

> 1) Improve block detection so that blocks could be arbitrarily
> indented.  So this is okay:
> <?py if ?>
>     <?py if ?>
>     <?py else ?>
>     <?py #end ?>
>   <?py if ?>
>   <?py else ?>
>   <?py #end ?>
> <?py end?>

> 2) Disallow inconsistent indenting of a single block level control
> structure.  For instance, this wound NOT be okay:
> <?py if ?>
>   <?py else ?>
>     <?py #end ?>

> 3) Generate python code with normalized indentation instead of using
> "if True:" dummy blocks.

> I think these three principals could be accomplished relatively easily
> with the following sort of pseudo-code algorithm:

> py_parse = re.compile(r'(\s*)<\?py (\s*)(.*?)\?>')
> output = []
> new_blocks = set(('if', 'while', 'for', 'try', 'with', 'def',
> 'class'))
> cont_blocks = set(('elif', 'else', 'except', 'finally'))
> indent_spaces = 4
> indent = ' ' * indent_spaces
> depth = -1
> for line in py_lines:
>   pre_space, in_space, statement = py_parse.match(line).groups()
>   if statement in new_blocks:
>     depth += 1
>     output.append(''.join((indent * depth, statement)))
>   elif statement in cont_blocks:
>     output.append(''.join((indent * depth, statement)))
>   elif statement.startswith('#end'):
>     depth -= 1
>   else:
>     output.append(''.join((indent * (depth+1), statement)))
> output = '\n'.join(output)

> I admit that this only handles single-line <?py> statements with no
> trailing text.  But, I think trailing text is easy and mutli-line <?py
> \n?> statements could be handled with an additional regex.

> I would personally like to see this functionality built-in to tenjin
> because I think it makes sense to better be able to combined html
> indentation levels with python statement indentation.  However, if
> this is not feasible it's not a very big problem for me.  I
> implemented a slightly simpler algorithm as a pre-process python
> script that strips out almost all leading whitespace.  It uses a
> similar technique to preserve <?py > indentation levels but only
> outputs a single space per indentation depth.  With this done, it is
> not hard to see and hand-edit inconsistent <?py> indentations.

> In a previous email I had mentioned that I used an HTML "compressor"
> to reduce file size by ~30%.  With the leading-space elimination pre-
> process script I managed to reduce the file size by ~25%.  That's
> enough that I don't feel bad about missing the last 5%.

> Thanks,
> Steve