I don't understand the "Lack of String Manipulation" either. Writing
filters or macros for these standard tools would not be that difficult. I
can only assume there is some philosophical reluctance. Perhaps because
filters are supposed to work on *Titles*, not *strings*, and changing a
Title's case, for instance, makes it into a new tiddler. But there are
already existing filters that break this premise, so ... dunno.
-- Mark
On Thursday, January 10, 2019 at 9:06:26 PM UTC-8, D X wrote:
>
> To wrap this thread up, while I love TiddlyWiki and don't see myself
> changing due to its elegance and flexibility, I also at times find aspects
> of it (several underlying this thread) frustrating:
>
> - Hard-to-Intuit / Understand Syntax / Parsing Rules: Do I reference
> something in a given context with double braces ({{}})? Single braces
> ({})?
> Double angle brackets (<<>>)? Single angle brackets (<>)? Dollar signs?
> Parens and dollar signs? Or will the kind of reference I'm trying to make
> not work at all in my current context? And how will some given wikitext /
> macro call / string be mangled by TW? Who knows? I haven't really
> developed
> a predictive mental model of TW's behavior in 6+ months of working with it.
> - Lack of String Manipulation: I expect built-in ways to do string
> concatenation, searching, and splitting that nest and work in most
> contexts
> (e.g., not hand-crafted and unreliable macros).
> - Limitations of Fields: It's hard to leverage the elegant database
> structure of TW when field names are constrained by some arcane naming
> constraints. (I realize not entirely TW's fault.)
> - Lack of JSON Index Operator Parity with Fields: And, to wit, it's
> not possible to fully move to JSON data-driven Tiddlers (instead of
> fields)
> when filters have so much built-in field searching and sorting operator
> support that isn't supported for indexes.
> - Documentation and examples at https://tiddlywiki.com/ are often
> either too simple for me (e.g., operator examples rarely show complex /
> dynamic values populated by fields and variables like we see in this
> thread, which is where I usually need help) or too terse, i.e., the
> non-example doc pages often have sentence-fragment-like descriptions of an
> operator's purpose or behavior.
>
> That said, after all the help from Mark (thank you!), I suspected that my
> filter string concatenation might work better if I weren't trying to
> assemble it from string literals in the wikitext (which is a bit
> counterintuitive from traditional programming), so I made my filter string
> components into fields that I could reference in my concat macro. This
> helped, although ultimately TW would only process the first 2 of these and
> the oddly the last one had to go back to being a literal:
>
> <$wikify name=search text=<<concat {{'Basics Template'!!search_prefix}}
> {{!!parent_page}} {{'Basics Template'!!search_middle}} {{!!parent_page}}
> '"]]+[sort[]nsort[birth_date]]' >> >
> <$list filter=<<search>> >
>
> In which search_prefix = [tag[data_page]search:text:literal["father": "
> And search_middle = "]][tag[data_page]search:text:literal["mother": "
>
> By the way, a more compact (although I suspect less performant) way to
> accomplish this filter / search is via a regex search filter similar to
> this:
>
> [tag[data_page]search:text:regexp[(\"mother\")|(\"father\"): \"
> {{!!parent_page}} \"]]
>
> Ultimately, however, even though I have mostly solved the search problem
> in this thread, I am finding JSON data tiddler filter operators too limited
> (e.g., no sorting) relative to the fairly robust field filter operators in
> TW, so I'm changing back to a mostly field-driven data model (with the
> exception of complex field names that must refer to Tiddler names, e.g.,
> field names that must contain capital letters and spaces, which TW cannot
> persist).
>
> However, the help has been much appreciated!
>
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