Editor in Scaffold should use tabs rather than spaces

[simon]

or at least spacing should be consistent in the translators it creates

[ajlyon]

Are you referring to the spacing of JSON output? I know that we frequently mess up the blame log for the JSON headers of translators, but that part is in Zotero's core translator saving code. Some of the issues recently are because I'm using MLZ + Scaffold, which until recently was using spaces.

If you're referring to the indentation that ACE gives us, we can probably modify it pretty easily. It's now producing spaces, and you'd prefer tabs?

[simon]

I changed translator.js on the trunk to use tabs for the JSON in r9629, but that's not what I find particularly bothersome.

What's more problematic is that since most translators (and all Zotero core code) use tabs but ACE uses spaces, editing a translator in Scaffold results in mixed indenting. I'd prefer that ACE indent with tabs instead of spaces. For bonus points, Scaffold could normalize spaces -> tabs with a regexp on load.

[ajlyon]

The ACE setting is fixed in ​https://bitbucket.org/ajlyon/scaffold/changeset/4413fd9c4647 and in the most recent build of Scaffold at ​http://www.gimranov.com/research/zotero

If you can recommend a reasonable regex for normalization, or a patch, we can normalize tabs on load. Somehow, I think that s/ {4}/\t/g won't do it, but maybe I'm mistaken.

[simon]

For the case of \t = 4 spaces:

function normalizeWhitespace(text) {
	return text.replace(/^[ \t]+/gm, function(str) {
		return str.replace(/ {4}/g, "\t");
	});
}

I think this would be sufficient. A more sophisticated algorithm would attempt to detect \t = 2 spaces, etc. but if there are translators with spacing like that, we can just correct them manually.

[ajlyon]

Fixed in bitbucket (​https://bitbucket.org/ajlyon/scaffold/changeset/d847789de18a). I'll merge all this back to subversion soon.

And I didn't realize that replace could take a callback as the second argument. That makes things a lot easier.