I would like to use tags like {{headline}} in the CodeIgniter views instead of PHP and I'm looking for a template parser. CodeIgniter has a built-in template parser: http://www.ellislab.com/codeigniter/user-guide/libraries/parser.html
The question is if it's better to use the built-in parser or another parser? Are there any limitations with the CI template parser like not supporting loops, if statements, etc.?
If so, there are a number of other parsers but it seems that a developer works on them for some time and then it falls into a numb state when it's not supported any more. I'm looking for a parser which will also be supported in a year:
Bucket
http://backstack.ca/projects/bucket/
Comper Template Parser
http://parser.comper.sk/en/
Ocular-Template-Library
http://github.com/lonnieezell/Ocular-Template-Library
Phil Sturgeon Template library
http://philsturgeon.co.uk/code/codeigniter-template
PyroCMS Lex Parser
http://github.com/pyrocms/lex
Template Library for CodeIgniter
http://www.williamsconcepts.com/ci/codeigniter/libraries/template/
The most active seem to be Comper and Lex Parser. What is the difference between Phil Sturgeon Template library and PyroCMS Lex Parser because it's the same developer?
What I am looking for is:
- Separation of PHP and HTML/CSS in views
- Solidly supported so that it's not stalled within a year
- Use of simple tags but also loops, if statements and other functions
Can anyone give me a tip? The existing information on the CI forum or elsewhere have not been really useful.
Many thanks!
Philip
How to Choose a Template Engine
I went through a similar exercise for choosing a PHP/CMS system, and here are some points that may carry over to your decision making process.
I first look at the documentation to get a sense of how much support there is for the system, evaluate range of features and so on. I also see if there is an online forum with enough activity to get some help if needed.
I then try out the installation to see if it goes smoothly. If I have trouble at this stage, I may simply quit and try another system unless there is an online forum or help desk with a ready answer.
I then set up a sample website (2-3 pages) and try out the features that I need. In the case of CodeIgniter, I may have content stored in multiple database tables and I evaluate how much effort it takes to get the data from my SQL queries into the array structure that can be used by the template system. This is usually the step that takes the most effort when developing the website.
I also check to see how easy I could integrate a PHP function into the mix. For example, I once had to build a specialized function to determine a range of dates and these dates had to be passed to the template engine. I was able to do it but it took a lot of effort. The template system had almost no support for parsing dates and I had to resort to a PHP function to do the work.
Summary
Ultimately, you will need to try a few of these systems out to get a feel for them. Once that is done, pick one that makes sense for your coding style, ease of use, and your data structure.
PS
I have not used the systems that you listed above but I have spent quite a bit of time using the template engine in Expression Engine (CMS from the same group that created CodeIgniter). My comments are based on my experience implementing database driven websites using Expression Engine and dealing with the limitations and quirks of that particular platform.
Related
I need to create a universal web scraper to parse articles on the different websites. Of course, I know about XPath, but I want to try to make it universal for any website despite the HTML markup of a page.
I need to determine whether there is an article on the page and if it is - parse a text of title, body and tags (if exists).
Frankly speaking, my knowledge in DS is not very huge, but I assume this task (determine whether it is article, and parsing only needed parts) is possible to solve.
What tools should I use? Any help?
Actually, for the second task, I need to implement something similar that google chrome mobile does. When page is not optimised for mobile, then propose to show the page in adaptive mode (just title, and main content).
If you are using Python, some libraries to look at are:
scrapy, which scrapes data and can extract some of the results) and,
BeautifulSoup, which is more geared towards the extraction part itself.
It is possible to request a version of a website (e.g. for Chrome, Safari, Mobile, old-school systems) by creating a custom header for your scraper.
HAve a look at the relevant documentation, and you can get an idea of how to use headers in scrapy here.
I do not know of any more specialised tools. Your tasks are more analytical and are typically not performed with the use of models for estimating e.g. what content is where on a webpage. This might be an intersting research direction though; to see if you can create a model that generalises across many websites to extract the desired content.
That leads me on to my last point, which is to say that creating a single scraper that works for any website *containing your artile type) is not usually possible. People create websites differently, however they see fit, which means they also change them. This usually leads to a good scraper requiring constant updates as time (and developers) moves on.
EDIT:
Then if you have lots of labelled examples, it might be possible to train a model. The challenge might be the look-back range of the model. For example, a typical LSTM model is given a parameter that tells it how far to look back into the past. It is stored within its memory internally. In your case, you might be looking for a start and end HTML tag of an article, to then extract just that part. These tahs could be thousands of words apart. Something a standard LSTM might not be fit to retain and use.
If you could pose your problem a little differently, then there are other approaches that might be plausible. E.g., you could make it a "question-answer" problem, by saying: I have this HTML, where is the article content? If that sounds ok for your use-case, have a look here for some model based approaches.
I am using asciid for an article. In the end of my document I want to have a list of figures. How to I create a list of figures? Did not find something useful in the documentation for me.
Nope there isn't one at the time of answer. I checked the docs (which you indicated you did as well) and I also grepped the codebase. There is good news though! You should be able to do this with an extension.
Extensions can be written in any JVM language if you're using asciidoctorj, or in Ruby if you're using the core asciidoctor (I'm not sure about JavaScript for asciidoctorjs). You'll need to create two extensions probably: a TreeProcessor extension to go through the whole AST looking for images and pulling them out into a storage structure. Then you'll also need to create either an inline or block macro to actually place it within the page.
I strongly recommend examining the API for the nodes and functions you'll want to make use of. There are some other examples of processors that may also be helpful to examine.
I'm building a site that allows users to make sense of a debate by graphically representing arguments for and against a particular issue. (Wrangl)
I'd like to categorise these debates so they are more easily found and connected. I don't want to irritate the person creating the debate by asking them to add tags and categories before they see any benefit, so I'm looking at a way of automatically extracting keywords.
What's a good approach for taking the debate's title and description (and possibly the content of the arguments themselves once there are some) to pull out, say, ten strong keywords that could be used as metadata to connect similar debates together, or even as the content of the "meta" keywords tag in the head of the HTML page where the debate is viewable. Eg. Datamapper vs ActiveRecord
The site is coded in Ruby with Sinatra, using DataMapper for data storage. I'm ideally looking for something which will work on Heroku (I don't have a way of writing files to disk dynamically), and I'd consider a web service, an API or ideally a Ruby gem.
Maybe you can use TextAnalyzer.
I understand that you're wanting to find an easy way of achieving this, I've recently dived into the world of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Text-mining and its a daunting process of which most went far above my head.
Although i managed to code some functionality that resembles what you're looking for, though I did it in PHP. What i would suggest, that if you want it tailored to your project (Wrangl) then do it yourself.
Using the Porter stemming algorithm which I'm sure there will be Ruby code for.
Ruby Porter stemmer
You can try the salsaAPI to automatically extract keywords and categorize the debates!
I want in an application with a simple text input, enriched with some marks to include formatting or semantic labeling. I want the syntax as easy as possible and I want to include self-defined labels.
Example:
[bold]Stackoverflow[/bold] is a [tag]good[/tag] resource for programmers.
Tables would be needed too.
HTML/XML and LaTeX are mighty enough to allow this, but too complicated. Wiki-Syntax seems simple, but uses another symbol for each markup, has unclear quoting and every Wiki seems to have another syntax. For tables and similar stuff Wiki becomes very complicated.
Exists a language/syntax, that matches my needs or can be slightly changed to do so? Or do I have to invent something myself? In that case, do you have suggestions?
Definitely do NOT invent your own. There are plenty of simple markup languages already, and users HATE learning new ones. Trust me on this!
I would suggest using one of the following:
Textile
Markdown
BBCode
Make your decision based on your userbase, as well as what tools and parsers are available in your chosen language. For my site, we went with Textile, but I've found that BBCode tends to be the language that most people already know. However, this will vary with different user demographics.
StackOverflow, along with several other sites, uses Markdown. I think it will give you the best balance between features and simplicity.
Let me add ReStructuredText to the list.
An additional benefit of using it is given by the availability of ReStructuredText to Anything service that makes extremely easy to create HTML or PDF versions of the document.
As already pointed out there are a lot of lightweight markup languages (many are listed here: wikipedia article), there should be no need of creating your own.
For example, right now I have a roll-my-own solution that uses data files that include blocks like:
PlayerCharacter Fighter
Hitpoints 25
Strength 10
StartPosition (0, 0, 0)
Art
Model BigBuffGuy
Footprint LargeFootprint
end
InventoryItem Sword
InventoryItem Shield
InventoryItem HealthPotion
end
human editable (w/ minimal junk characters, ideally)
resilient to errors (fewest 'wow i can't parse anything useful anymore' style errors, and thus i've lost all of the data in the rest of the file) - but still able to identify and report them, of course. My example the only complete failure case is missing 'end's.
nested structure style data
array/list style data
customizable foundation types
fast
Are there any well known solutions that meet/exceed these requirements?
Yaml is a good solution and very close to what you have. Search for it.
I second the YAML suggestion. It's extremely easy to edit, very forgiving of mistakes and widely supported (especially among the dynamic languages).
I'd say the most common choices are:
JSON (offical site) - very flexible, though the punctuation can take a bit for people to get used to
INI - super simple to use, but a bit limited in data-types
XML - pretty flexible, common, but way too verbose sometimes
You could try JSON available at: http://www.json.org/
It was designed for javascript and web usage initially. But it's pretty clean, and supported in many languages.
Lua was designed to be a programming language where the syntax lets you easily use it as a markup language as well, so that you include data files as if they were code. Many computer games use it for their scripting, such as World of Warcraft due to its speed and ease of use. However it's originally designed and maintained for the energy industry so there's a serious background.
Scheme with its S-expressions is also a very nice but different-looking syntax for data. Finally, you've got XML that has the benefit of the most entry-level developers knowing it. You can also roll your own well-defined and efficient parser with a nice development suite such as ANTLR.
I would suggest JSON.
Just as readable/editable as YAML
If you happen to use for Web then can be eval()'ed into JavaScript objects
Probably as cross language as YAML