Substitute and extract information from content by using regular expressions
Description
This plugin allows to substitute and extract information from content by
using regular expressions. There are three different types of new functions:
- FORMATLIST: maniplulate a list of items; it is highly configurable to define what constitutes a list and how to extract items from it
- SUBST, STARTSUBST/STOPSUBST: substiture a pattern in a chunk of text
- EXTRACT, STARTEXTRACT/STOPEXTRACT: extract a pattern from a text
While the START-STOP versions of SUBST and EXTRACT work on inline text,
the normal versions process a source topic before including it into the current one.
Syntax Rules
SUBST
Syntax:
%SUBST{topic="..." ...}%
insert a topic by processing its content.
-
topic="..."
: name of the topic text to be processed
-
text="..."
: text to be processed (has got higher precedence than 'topic')
-
pattern="..."
: pattern to be extracted or substituted
-
format="..."
: format expression or pattern substitute
-
header="..."
: header string prepended to output
-
footer="..."
: footer string appended to output
-
limit="<n>"
maximum number of occurences to extract or substitute counted from the start of the text (defaults to 100000
aka all hits)
-
skip="<n>"
skip the first n occurences
-
exclude="..."
: skip occurences that match this regular expression
-
include="..."
: skip occurences that don't match this regular expression
- sort="on,off,alpha,num" order of the formatted items (default "off")
-
expand="on,off"
: toggle expansion of markup before filtering (defaults to on
)
STARTSUBST, STOPSUBST
Syntax:
%STARTSUBST{...}%
...
%STOPSUBST%
substitute text given inline. see
SUBST.
Syntax:
%EXTRACT{topic="..." ...}%
extract text from a topic. see
SUBST.
Syntax:
%STARTEXTRACT{...}%
...
%STOPEXTRACT%
extract content given inline. see
SUBST.
Syntax:
%FORMATLIST{"<list>" ...}%
formats a list of items. The <list> argument is separated into items by using
a split expression; each item is matched agains a pattern and then formatted
using a format string while being separated by a separator string; the result is
prepended with a header and appended with a footer in case the list is not empty.
- <list>: the list
- tokenize="...": regex to tokenize the list before spliting it up, tokens are inserted back again after the split stage has been passed
- split="...": the split expression (default ",")
- replace="key1=value1,key2=value2, ...": this allows to preprocess each list item by replacing the given keys with their value
- pattern="...": pattern applied to each item (default "\s(.*)\s")
- format="...": the format string for each item (default "$1")
- header="...": header string
- footer="...": footer string
- separator="...": string to be inserted between list items
- lastseparator="...": string separating the last item from the rest of the list
- null="...": the format string to render the empty list
- hideempty="on,off": when set to "on" then empty list items will not be added to the result (empty in the sense of ''); set this to "off" to still add them (default "on")
- limit="...": max number of items to be taken out of the list (default "-1")
- skip="...": number of list items to skip, not adding them to the result
- sort="on,off,alpha,num,nocase" order of the formatted items (default "off")
- reverse="on,off": reverse the sortion of the list
- unique="on,off": remove dupplicates from the list
- exclude="...": remove list items that match this regular expression
- include="...": remove list items that don't match this regular expression
- selection="...": regular expression that a list item must match to be "selected"; if this matches the
$marker
is inserted
- marker="...": string to be inserted when the
selection
regex matches; this will be inserted at the position $marker
as indicated in format
.
- map="key1=value1,key2=value2, ...": this establishes a key-value hash available via the
$map()
variable. (see also the replace
parameter for means to preprocess list items automatically.)
The pattern string shall group matching substrings in the list item to which
you can refer to by using $1, $2, ... in the format string. Any format string
(
format
,
header
,
footer
) may contain variables
$percnt$
,
$nop
,
$dollar
and
$n
. The variable
$index
referse to the position number within
the list being formatted;
$hits
refers to the total number of matched list
elements;
$count
expands to the total number of elements in the list;
$marker
is set if the
selection
regular expression matches the
current item. The
$map(key)
macro returns the value for "key" as specified in
the
map
argument.
MAKEINDEX
Syntax:
%MAKEINDEX{"<list>" ...}%
formats a list into a multi-column index like in MediaWiki's category topcis.
MAKEINDEX insert capitals as headlines to groups of sorted items. It will try to balance all
columns equally, and keep track of breaks to prevent "schusterkinder", that is avoid
isolated headlines at the bottom of a column.
parameters:
- <list>: the list of items
- split="...": the split expression to separate the <list> into items (default ",")
- pattern="...": pattern applied to each item (default "(.*)")
- cols="...": maximum number of cols to split the list into
- format="...": format of each list item (default "$item")
- sort="on,off,alpha,num,nocase": sort the list (default "on")
- unique="on/off": removed duplicates (default "off")
- exclude="...": pattern to check against items in the list to be excluded
- include="...": pattern to check against items in the list to be included
- reverse="on/off": reverse the list (default "off")
- header="...": format string to prepend to the result
- footer="..." format string to be appended to the result
- transliterate="on/off/<mapping>" influences the way sorting and grouping is handled: either a boolean switch to enable/disable decoding unicodes into their neares latin character (using CPAN:Text::Unidecode), or a custom mapping list
"<source1>=<target1>, <source2>=<target2>, ..."
to map a source string to a given target string (default "on")
Like in FORMATLIST the
format
parameter can make use of
$1
,
$2
, ... variables
to match the groupings defined in the
pattern
argument (like in
pattern="(.*);(.*);(.*)"
) .
The first matched grouping $1 will be used as the $item to sort the list and is optionally being transliterated.
In addition
header
and
footer
might contain the
$anchors
variable which will expand
to a navigation to jump to the groups within the index.
Examples
One of the uses of this plugin is to extract data from tables, which is useful for creating "database-like" wiki applications where data is stored in foswiki tables. While it is certainly possible to do that without this plugin the plugin makes these requests easier to create and maintain. Note, however, that best practice is to store database-like
information using
DataForms, so that you don't need to parse the format of the data to extract its records repeatedly.
The table:
Pos |
Description |
Hours |
1 |
onsite troubleshooting |
3 |
2 |
normalizing data to new format |
10 |
3 |
testing server performance |
5 |
You type:
%EXTRACT{topic="%TOPIC%" expand="off"
pattern="^\|\s\s(.*?)\s*\|\s*(.*?)\s*\|\s*(.*?)\s*\|"
format=" * it took $3 hours $2$n"
skip="1"
}%
Expected result (simulated):
- it took 3 hours onsite troubleshooting
- it took 10 hours normalizing data to new format
- it took 5 hours testing server performance
Actual result (this site):
- it took 3 hours onsite troubleshooting
- it took 10 hours normalizing data to new format
- it took 5 hours testing server performance
- it took hours rewrite MAKEINDEX from using tables to css3 multicolumn
- it took hours don't fallback to unidecode if an explicit mapping is given; don't use Foswiki's internal anchor creator as it does not support unicode
- it took hours fixing deprecated unescaped left brace in regexes
- it took hours transliterate/normalize unicode strings before sorting them in MAKETEXT
- it took hours fixed paging through lists in FORMATLIST
- it took hours modernized plugin by using a proper OO-core; fixed processing of
tokenize
properly; added replace
parameter for FORMATLIST; fixed the plugin calling Foswiki::Func::expandCommonVariables()
itself unnecessarily
- it took hours fixed SUBST macro
topic
param processing embedded META
- it took hours fixed parsing zero values in lists (by Grzegorz Marszalek)
- it took hours fixed wrapper for non-official api call to getAnchorName on foswiki-1.1
- it took hours ease
tokenize
; forward compatibility for newer foswikis
- it took hours added
include
counterpart to already existing exclude
params; fixed SUBST not to forget about the non-matching tail of a char sequence
- it took hours added
$anchors
to MAKEINDEX (by Dirk Zimoch); added nocase
option to FORMATLIST (by Dirk Zimoch); fixed null/empty string match in FORMATLIST
- it took hours sorting a list before, not after, formatting it in FORMATLIST
- it took hours added MAKEINDEX, added lazy compilation
- it took hours using registerTagHandler() as far as possible; enhanced parameters to EXCTRACT and SUBST
- it took hours fixed SUBST, added skip parameter to FORMATLIST
- it took hours fixed
limit
parameter in FORMATLIST
- it took hours added
use strict;
and fixed revealed errors
- it took hours fixed SUBST not to cut off the rest of the text
Use CSS tags to format text comments as a tabular data (e.g., to allow sorting).
The comments:
-- Michael Daum on 22 Aug 2005
-- Michael Daum on 22 Aug 2005
You type:
%EXTRACT{
topic="%TOPIC%" expand="off"
pattern=".div class=\"text\">.*?[\r\n]+(.*?)[\r\n]+(?:.*?[\r\n]+)+?-- (.*?) on (.*?)[\r\n]+"
format="| $3 | $2 | $1 ... |$n" header="|*Date*|*Author*|*Headline*|$n"
}%
Expected result (simulated):
Date |
Author |
Headline |
22 Aug 2005 |
Michael Daum |
This is the first comment. ... |
22 Aug 2005 |
Michael Daum |
This is the second comment. ... |
Actual result (this site):
Date |
Author |
Headline |
22 Aug 2005 |
Michael Daum |
This is the first comment. ... |
22 Aug 2005 |
Michael Daum |
This is the second comment. ... |
MAKEINDEX example 1: creating an index from a chunk of text
compare with
Philosophy articles needing attention
MAKEINDEX example 2: creating an index for a search result
Installation Instructions
You do not need to install anything in the browser to use this extension. The following instructions are for the administrator who installs the extension on the server.
Open configure, and open the "Extensions" section. "Extensions Operation and Maintenance" Tab -> "Install, Update or Remove extensions" Tab. Click the "Search for Extensions" button.
Enter part of the extension name or description and press search. Select the desired extension(s) and click install. If an extension is already installed, it will
not show up in the
search results.
You can also install from the shell by running the extension installer as the web server user: (Be sure to run as the webserver user, not as root!)
cd /path/to/foswiki
perl tools/extension_installer <NameOfExtension> install
If you have any problems, or if the extension isn't available in
configure
, then you can still install manually from the command-line. See
https://foswiki.org/Support/ManuallyInstallingExtensions for more help.
Dependencies
Name | Version | Description |
---|
Text::Unidecode | >=1.27 | Optional |
Change History
30 Aug 2017: |
rewrite MAKEINDEX from using tables to css3 multicolumn |
05 Sep 2016: |
added $hits to FORMATLIST to distinguish it from $count and $index |
29 Apr 2016: |
don't fallback to unidecode if an explicit mapping is given; don't use Foswiki's internal anchor creator as it does not support unicode |
20 Apr 2016: |
added transliterate parameter, including custom mappings; upgraded Text::Unidecode fallback shipped with this plugin |
31 Aug 2015: |
fixing deprecated unescaped left brace in regexes |
17 Jul 2015: |
fixed compatibility with Foswiki-2.x |
10 Apr 2014: |
transliterate/normalize unicode strings before sorting them in MAKETEXT |
19 Jun 2012: |
added lastseparator (by Foswiki:Main/OliverKrueger); fixed paging when using together with include and exclude parameters |
15 May 2012: |
fixed paging through lists in FORMATLIST |
05 May 2012: |
fixed lists not being processed properly before iterating over them in FORMATLIST and MAKEINDEX |
19 Apr 2012: |
modernized plugin by using a proper OO-core; fixed processing of tokenize properly; added replace parameter for FORMATLIST; fixed the plugin calling Foswiki::Func::expandCommonVariables() itself unnecessarily |
10 Jan 2012: |
fixed filtering zero; fixed counting list items without formating them; added hideempty parameter to enable/disable rendering empty list items |
29 Sep 2011: |
fixed SUBST macro topic param processing embedded META |
25 Aug 2011: |
fixed perl rookie error initializing defaults |
14 Jul 2011: |
fixed parsing zero values in lists (by Grzegorz Marszalek) |
06 Apr 2011: |
fixed SUBST to removing everything after the last match |
23 Jul 2010: |
fixed wrapper for non-official api call to getAnchorName on foswiki-1.1 |
07 Jun 2010: |
fixed expanding standard escapes ($n, $percent, ...); improved examples in docu |
12 Feb 2010: |
ease tokenize ; forward compatibility for newer foswikis |
17 Nov 2009: |
added tokenize pattern for FORMATLIST; fixed potential deep recursion in SUBST/EXTRACT |
14 Sep 2009: |
added include counterpart to already existing exclude params; fixed SUBST not to forget about the non-matching tail of a char sequence |
17 Apr 2009: |
converted to foswiki, added numerical sorting to MAKETEXT |
08 Oct 2008: |
added $anchors to MAKEINDEX (by Dirk Zimoch); added nocase option to FORMATLIST (by Dirk Zimoch); fixed null/empty string match in FORMATLIST |
20 Aug 2008: |
added selection and marker to FORMATLIST, similar in use as VarWEBLIST |
03 Jul 2008: |
sorting a list before, not after, formatting it in FORMATLIST |
08 May 2008: |
added 'text' parameter to SUBST and EXTRACT; fixed SUBST as it was pretty useless before |
07 Dec 2007: |
added MAKEINDEX, added lazy compilation |
14 Sep 2007: |
added sorting for EXTRACT and SUBST |
02 May 2007: |
using registerTagHandler() as far as possible; enhanced parameters to EXCTRACT and SUBST |
05 Feb 2007: |
fixed escapes in format strings; added better default value for max number of hits to prevent deep recursions on bad regexpressions |
22 Jan 2007: |
fixed SUBST, added skip parameter to FORMATLIST |
18 Dec 2006: |
using registerTagHandler for FORMATLIST |
13 Oct 2006: |
fixed limit parameter in FORMATLIST |
31 Aug 2006: |
added NO_PREFS_IN_TOPIC |
15 Aug 2006: |
added use strict; and fixed revealed errors |
14 Feb 2006: |
moved in FORMATLIST from the Foswiki:Extensions/NatSkinPlugin; added escape variables to format strings |
06 Dec 2005: |
fixed SUBST not to cut off the rest of the text |
09 Nov 2005: |
fixed deep recursion using expand="on" |
22 Aug 2005: |
Initial version; added expand toggle |