use Perl

• What's wrong with it? (Score:2)

  by schwern (1528)

  Color me stupid, but what's wrong with it? Or, put another way, what structure are you trying to express?
  • Re: (Score:2)

    by Ovid (2709)

    What's wrong with what? If you mean the even-sized list, that should actually be an ordered list of pairs. That's something which Perl 6 can express, but not Perl 5 (at least, not cleanly). As a result, I need an even-sized list in the correct format (which sucks), or a list of hashes, each of which only has one key/value pair. I expect I'll go with the latter.

    Or were you referring to something else?
    • Re:What's wrong with it? (Score:2)

      by schwern (1528) on 2008.01.31 14:21 (#60768) Homepage Journal

      I'm unable to envision the structure you're trying to express. I don't understand how the XML and the two YAML snippets relate to each other.
      
      Some of the assertions confuse me because they seem to be wrong. Like "YAML doesn't really support the idea of an array of pairs or ordered hashes". They address this specifically in the spec [yaml.org]. Wouldn't an array of pairs be:

          - key:   value
          - this:  that
          - up:    down

      And why does it need to be ordered?
      
      If you can show me what you'd like to express, in some made-up magic formatting language, I think I can show you how to express it in YAML. I'm going to take a stab and say you want this:

      elements:
        - name:
            type: string
            attributes:
              some_attr:
                  method: dummy_attribute
        - email*:
            type: string
        - phone+:
            method: phone_numbers
            type: string
        - active:
            data: yes

      That's assuming the * and + things are part of the actual key name. It translates into:

      {
        'elements' => [
          {
            'name' => {
              'type' => 'string',
              'attributes' => {
                'some_attr' => {
                  'method' => 'dummy_attribute'
                }
              }
            }
          },
          {
            'email*' => {
              'type' => 'string'
            }
          },
          {
            'phone+' => {
              'type' => 'string',
              'method' => 'phone_numbers'
            }
          },
          {
            'active' => {
              'data' => 'yes'
            }
          }
        ]
      };

      If you can drop the ordering requirement it becomes even simpler:

      elements:
         name:
            type: string
            attributes:
              some_attr:
                  method: dummy_attribute
         email*:
            type: string
         phone+:
            method: phone_numbers
            type: string
         active:
            data: yes

      which translates to

      {
        'elements' => {
          'active' => {
            'data' => 'yes'
          },
          'name' => {
            'type' => 'string',
            'attributes' => {
              'some_attr' => {
                'method' => 'dummy_attribute'
              }
            }
          },
          'phone+' => {
            'type' => 'string',
            'method' => 'phone_numbers'
          },
          'email*' => {
            'type' => 'string'
          }
        }
      };

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