Preprocessor for Windows, good for generating HTML files

Question

I need a template engine (preprocessor) for Windows that allows me to define my own (very simple) language. I need it for generating html files. It should be able to make macro substitutions but also to make replacements like this:

replace this:

lnk(http://www.example.com)

with this:

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.example.com">http://www.example.com</a>

I prefer to be able to define replacements in a text file - preferably in a way that looks readable, where you can write http:// instead of an escape sequence like http:\/\/ (sed has this issue).

Later edit: meanwhile I managed to do something like this using sed for Windows, but the script looks dreadful:

#Plain link
s/lnk\x28\(.*\)\x29/<a target="_blank" href="\1">\1<\/a>/g

Instead, it would be much better to be able to define replacements in a way like this:

#Replace this:
lnk(@var)
#With this:
<a target="_blank" href="$var">$var</a>

Basically I need to compile a source text file into a HTML file.

I'm using Windows 10 x64

Answer 1

You might consider the UNIX/Linux standard macro preprocessor m4, which does have at least one port to Windows, and is almost certainly available in WSL (although you didn't indicate what version of Windows you're using). I'm pretty sure it can handle your example substitution cleanly, and defines the substitutions almost as simply as your desire.

Another possibility is gpp, a generalized preprocessor whose syntax is different from that of m4, but still simple. There is an (unmaintained) Windows build.

Answer 2

To generate files with e-mail signatures I used python based jinja2 template engine. Bacause I like python (and template filled by data extracted from web, so python scrapy is good suited).