PowerShell: Compile HTML
Templating engine in a few lines
In the last calendar year, I did three different jobs, for three different employes, at three different offices. Changing jobs frequently in a short period of time means lots of handover notes.
I like writing my notes in HTML, for a lot of reasons. It looks nice, and I like working with it. One thing I can do is write many, smaller, more specific subsections, that get compiled into one big HTML file, with a contents page at the top (with links).
The way I do this is by having a folder of sections, each section in its own HTML file. Then, I have a template or a shell, which includes the <head> and the main <body>.
Within the <body>, I have a comment, that says <!-- PLACEHOLDER --> or <!-- INSERT POINT --> or similar. This is where the content is going.
Example
Let's say that we have the following folder:
|_ template.html
|_ documentation.html
|_ \sections
|_ 1. First Section.html
|_ 2. Second Section.html
template.html will look something like this:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
<title>Documentation</title>
</head>
<body>
<!-- INSERT POINT -->
</body>
</html>
I have a function loaded in PowerShell called build that targets this folder and compiles it.
function build {
$docsdir = "C:\path\to\docs\folder"
$contents = Get-ChildItem "$docsdir\sections" |
ForEach-Object {Get-Content $_};
(Get-Content "$docsdir\template.html").replace("<!-- INSERT POINT -->", $contents) > "$docsdir\documentation.html"
}