Reusing Selectors

[FrankC01]

David,

Been a user for a while. Moving into something else that produces hiccup vector tree format (instaparse) and am reviewing your selector library thinking I could re-use most of it.

My question is: It seems that the non-usable aspect would be limited to the 'tag' and 'attr' selectors, but am I blinded by desire and missing some subtle aspect which would render the whole idea moot?

Thanks in advance,
Frank

[davidsantiago]

I'm not sure what exactly your goals are, so I can't say if this would be an easy change for you. I can tell you that Hickory is a bit of a second pass, for me. I originally wrote Tinsel, which works on the hiccup vector tree format, and has selectors similar to Hickory's. I wrote Hickory largely because I wasn't satisfied with what I could do with Tinsel. So it is certainly possible.

Some issues, off the top of my head, that led me in this direction. Hiccup's vector tree format doesn't fully cover an HTML document, so sometimes you have to stick certain things in a string with the HTML in it. It's also a more write-optimized format, so while it's nicer to write Hiccup, it takes more work to parse it and work with it, since various pieces of information can appear in multiple ways and forms may have elements in varying places. Also, the aforementioned "Need to put doctype and other things in a string" issue can bring this to the point of "maybe not even really possible."

This is not to say don't do it, you can get pretty far in that direction, and maybe far enough to meet your needs completely. Just letting you know what I ran into when I was trying to make that work.

[FrankC01]

I will venture forward to see how things shake out. Basically I'm trying to avoid rolling my own vector-zip predicate library but have the flexibility to extend....

[FrankC01]

Update: So, I opted to start with data.zip as the foundation and have been writing predicate/selector functions 'tuned in' to the domain semantics of the vector tree (FYI: Manchester Owl parsed using instaparse)

So at this point, with the fundamental path selectors and subquery type things in place, I'm re-reviewing your selector library for inspiration for the next level. Thanks for paving the way !