spaces, spaces, who's got the spaces

[kevinmcl]

I run a command in an ssh session to one of our company's appliances.
The command output is displayed in the ssh terminal and I copy it.

I paste it into Flare.

I don't know how to do it here, so I'm going to fake the spaces with periods.

Here's what I paste (remember those dots are blank spaces)

Slot......Label .........Enabled .....Locked....May Lock
1 .........Profile1 .......1..............0...............0
2 ........ Profile2 .......1..............0 ..............0
[many more rows]

and here's what Flare gives me

Slot Label Enabled Locked May Lock
1 Profile1 1 0 0
2 Profile2 1 0 0

and so on.

Naturally, I go back to all the places where spaces were stripped and type "[Shift][spacebar]" many times.

Naturally, I get tired of doing this, so I select a chunk of hard spaces and [Ctrl][C] it (i.e., copy).
Then I place my cursor where a bunch of spaces should be and I [Ctrl][V] .

My results are inconsistent, but uniformly bad.

Sometimes, a clump of spaces gets inserted (woohoo!) but then when I do a later insert within that same paragraph, the previous inserted clumps of spaces suddenly retract themselves. Then, I can place the cursor and [Ctrl][V] until my fingers bleed and nothing at all happens. Nothing.

So, maybe I go to the menu and try Edit > Paste and (woohoo!) it works a couple of times..... but then it stops working. It might, or might not decide to obliterate any previous paste operations in the paragraph, but it steadfastly refuses to insert any more.

I can go back to typing [Shift][spacebar] and those are accepted... one at a time.

As a further sweetener, I tried doing this in "Show tags" mode. When I switched back to not showing tags, several of the pasted clumps of spaces (but not all of them) were yanked... and yes, they're still gone when I toggle back to "Show tags".

Can somebody please explain the rules?
And what is the proper way to format this kind of thing?
Is there another character that I can use - in place of space or [Shift][space]?

- Kevin

[Andrew]

You should be able to use the <pre> tag to preserve spaces you include.

[SteveS]

Have you tried pasting   for each space?

[LTinker68]

You could also create a custom span class that had a width of 20px or something and apply that span class to a single blank space between each word. That way your spacing would be uniform. However, I think the <pre> tag option would be easiest.

[kevinmcl]

To insert <pre> </Pre> :

I can edit a file in an external editor, but that's totally cumbersome for something this small.

How to insert html tags directly (internal editor) so that they are parsed as tags and not (as is the case normally) just accepted as literal content text?

- K

[Andrew]

pre is one of the built-in styles. Place your cursor in the paragraph you want to preserve line breaks and click pre in the Styles panel (or however you select your styles).

[doc_guy]

In terms of formatting, what your UI was trying to do was replicate a table. You can use a table to display tabular data, which is what that output is. Now I don't know of an easy way to covert your spaces into table cells, but if it were me, I'd be copying and pasting that content into table cells, since tables are for just such data.

[Andrew]

Another approach is to simply take a screen capture of the output in your CLI.

[forfear]

I run a command in an ssh session to one of our company's appliances.
The command output is displayed in the ssh terminal and I copy it.


Slot......Label .........Enabled .....Locked....May Lock
1 .........Profile1 .......1...............0...............0
2 ........ Profile2 .......1..............0 ..............0
[many more rows]
Can somebody please explain thes?
And what is the proper way to format this kind of thing?
Is there another character that I can use - in place of space or [Shift][space]?

Good suggestion to insert this into a <pre> tag or a <keyboard> tag.
alternatively create a paragraph style class called keyboard or preformatted to achieve the same effect. set the font to a fixed width font.

Set the display attribute (CSS Stylesheet Editor) to pre 'line-wrap' or something like that. i don't have Flare with me, this is pretty vague. there is a CSS attribute in the stylesheet editor that will help you tell flare how to handle the empty spaces, line breaks,etc which are being 'absorbed' when shown in a web browser. this display attribute will tell flare/web browser how to handle lines of characters or that this is 'preformatted code ' which means any spaces in the code view will display as such, so spaces do not disappear or 'get assimilated like the Borg in star trek'.

Since this is content from a console session 'ssh', you'll want some sort of monospaced font like Courier New, Lucida Console or Terminal which are fixed width fonts. usually popular with line captures from console type outputs like ssh or code descriptions in technical documentation.
In a fixed width font, the width of each character is the same whether its a 'w' 'a' or an 'i'.


This will ensure all the 'columns' and spaces align correctly when you paste them from a console window which also uses a fixed width font.