[texhax] TexLua configuration file parsing

[Brian Dunn]

I am updating the lwarp HTML converter for eventual release on CTAN.

I made a texlua program to replace the dependencies on make, grep, and
gawk. It works well, but one concern is that it loads a
project-specific configuration file via a lua "dofile" command, which
means that the configuration file itself is live lua code.

There are "sandbox" methods shown in various lua-related posts, some of
which apparently don't work with newer versions of lua, and I haven't
researched just how much of lua and its libraries are in texlua anyhow.

Has this problem already been solved in the texlua subset of lua?  It'd
be nice to not rely on anything outside of what ships with TexLive and
MikTeX.


(Other approaches include the make/grep/gawk combination or shell
scripts, with have portability issues; perl, which ships with TeXLive,
and could work; or latexmk, which is not quite flexible enough for this
use.)


Brian


-- 
Brian Dunn
BD Tech Concepts LLC
http://www.BDTechConcepts.com
bd at BDTechConcepts.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/bdtechconcepts/