At 09:55 06/06/2004 -0700, Bob Nelson wrote:
...so let's dive in with both feet.
I'll do the same, and probably land myself right in trouble :)
I've only just started investigating Revolution, with no previous experience with Hypercard or AnythingCard - so these are comments that need to be treated accordingly.
So I've got a little script that does a moderately simple thing: Grab a web page, bring it back, strip useless data out of it (right now, I've just got it stripping out the extra returns and leading spaces per line) and the next step will be to kill the HTML on the page so I can mine the data...
Stripping HTML can become tricky - I'd look around and see if there is a user-contributed script / library to deal with the heavy lifting ...
My layout and code are fairly simple:
Two fields and two buttons so I can work through the example - the first field is the 'holder' of the remote URL which has been retrieved (Imported_Raw) and the second field will be the restructured output when I'm done.
Here's the code, for those who want to dive deeper...
I'll leave specific comments to those who know better, but doing all the manipulation in the same field looks inefficient - put the processed sections into a separate (results) field (and don't display it until done).
Here's what I noticed about execution:
5. Looking through all the examples I can find, as well as documentation, I noted that there aren't many examples related to text manipulation - and importing/exporting text, etc., in/out of your stack. I'm sure I missed something on this front, as I'm sure people would be doing this all the time... Can anyone point me in a direction?
From an outsider's point of view, the lack of a regular expression package in Revolution looks like it will make this (the real problem, not the simple first step) a harder problem than it need have been. One of the things that attracted me to Revolution was a statement along the lines of "text processing like you've never seen" - but I haven't found anything to justify that claim yet. The built-in tokenizing is neat, but hardly revolutionary, and the apparent lack of RE looks like a big missing feature. (Please tell me it's in there and I just missed it in the docs ....)
Although Revolution looks great for some things, I'd have said that a text-processing problem with minimal user interaction doesn't look like the sweet-spot for Revolution.
I did a simple Python attempt at your simple problem - prompt for URL, read URL in, strip blank lines and leading spaces. Didn't bother with a progress bar - the processing takes less than a second anyway (for 210K lines -> 145K lines).
Finally, I'm impressed with the professional layout of the product - this could well be the perfect 'update' (I'm sure they don't like to hear that at Rev!) to HyperCard. I'm looking forward to a book, like The Complete HyperCard Handbook, that lays out the functionality of Revolution as an awesome reference book.
-- Alex Tweedly.
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