Loading a mapfile from a string...

[Steve Lime]

Hi Folks: I've been screwing around with getting mapserver to ingest a mapfile stored in a string buffer rather than a file. In theory you could build up a configuration from text snippets or database output rather than manipulating objects directly. The code could almost do this in the past but needed some reorganization to re-use as much as possible. The result is a new function called msLoadMapFromString. I took the opportunity to fix some naming wierdness in mapfile.c and to clean up lexer initialization a bit. In otherwords I'm sitting on a fair number of minor changes to mapfile.c and maplexer.l (with a few other small edits elsewhere). Is this a big enough deal to warrant a RFC or can I just commit?

Steve

BTW A sample perl snippet might look like (mapscript integration isn't part of these changes other than exposing the function):

$buffer = "MAP ... END";
$map = $mapscript::msLoadMapFromString($buffer, undef); # takes the buffer and an optional directory (location of symbols...)