Ralph, I appreciate the feedback, thanks. I’m a pretty terrible Python programmer, having last touched it in 2001/2002 when I started at university (and no-one else used it). I’ll throw your complete set of comments to Claude and see what it thinks.
As I’m about to send the resulting output files to a Chinese harness factory, the latest commit now features simplified Chinese support and support for cores contained within a sheath (a cable as it were)… On Tue, 12 May 2026 at 11:45, Ralph Corderoy <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Hugh, > > > It started off just getting Claude to generate these directly from the > > csv, but by the time I’d done a couple of them it made sense to get it > > into a simple program. All told it’s about half a day of work. Claude > > did all the program architecture, wrote all the code, wrote the docs, > > managed the repo and pushed to my GitHub. > > Thanks for making that available. I was curious so here's some > comments. > > > When looking at the HTML produced for the example, I was puzzled why > clicking each of the ‘Bootlace ferrule’ wires in turn switched the > highlight to them except for ‘TL-GND (power meter’ which cancelled the > highlight. > > It's because clicking the text doesn't ‘pick’; clicking the rectangle > the text sits in is needed. ‘TL-GND (power meter’ is the longest piece > of text so when I ran the mouse down vertically, it happened to be over > text for just that one wire. > > I think the text should pick too, e.g. ‘13 Mode change’. > > > I looked just at the start of wd/parser.py: > > 5 # Flexible column name aliases (all lowercase, spaces normalised) > 6 COLUMN_ALIASES: dict[str, list[str]] = { > 7 "signal": ["signal", "signal name", "name", "wire", "wire > name"], > 8 "left_conn": ["left connector", "left conn", "from > connector", "from", > 9 "source connector", "source"], > 10 "left_pin": ["left pin", "from pin", "source pin", "pin > (left)", "left pin no"], > 11 "right_conn": ["right connector", "right conn", "to > connector", "to", > 12 "dest connector", "destination connector", > "destination", > 13 "termination", "termination type"], > 14 "right_pin": ["right pin", "to pin", "dest pin", > "destination pin", > 15 "pin (right)", "right pin no"], > 16 "colour": ["wire colour", "wire color", "colour", > "color", "wire col"], > 17 "warning": ["warning", "note", "notes", "annotation", > "remark"], > 18 "pair": ["pair", "twisted pair", "tp", "pair group", > "cable group"], > 19 "length": ["length", "wire length", "len"], > 20 } > > COLUMN_ALIASES is only currently used by parser.py so perhaps it could > be better hidden from importers. > > That the value is a list suggests to me, trying to understand its > purpose, that it may be modified, but it isn't. A tuple avoids this. > > It would be nice if the first string in the list of values was > consistently the same as the key. Then I wouldn't need to hunt to see > if that was true each time, as it is. > > 23 def _norm(h: str) -> str: > 24 return h.strip().lower().replace("_", " ").replace("-", " ") > > This smells wrong: stripping spaces only to then turn some characters > into spaces. > > 27 def _map_headers(headers: list[str]) -> dict[str, int]: > 28 norm = {_norm(h): i for i, h in enumerate(headers)} > 29 result: dict[str, int] = {} > 30 for field, aliases in COLUMN_ALIASES.items(): > 31 for alias in aliases: > 32 if alias in norm: > 33 result[field] = norm[alias] > 34 break > 35 return result > > I haven't looked at the calls of this so it might not be possible, and > if it is possible it may not matter, but headers[] may be mapped onto > a norm{} which has fewer keys than len(headers). The last one wins, > having its index, ‘i’, stored. This might confuse the user. > > And if a normalised header element isn't found in the aliases, which > include the key itself, then it is silently dropped by not appearing in > result[]. > > The example CSV could show that blank lines and comments are allowed, > that spaces can be used within fields to create columns, and notes may > be given. > > -- > Cheers, Ralph. > > -- > Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2026-06-02 20:00 > Check to whom you are replying > Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... https://dorset.lug.org.uk > New thread, don't hijack: mailto:[email protected] > -- Next meeting: Online, Jitsi, Tuesday, 2026-06-02 20:00 Check to whom you are replying Meetings, mailing list, IRC, ... https://dorset.lug.org.uk New thread, don't hijack: mailto:[email protected]
