PreshBlog

I discovered pQuery the other day, and had been meaning to try it out.

I got the chance to use it today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. I am, however, rather wary that the last release was nearly two years ago; I’m not sure I’d want to use it in production code unless it’s being actively maintained – I might use it for non-important things before making that call.

Anyway, a brief example:

Let’s say you want to capture the content of a paragraph/div with the class “bar” from a page somewhere.. it can be as simple as:

pQuery('http://www.example.com/foo.html')->find('.bar')->html;

Let’s say you want to extract all H1 headings instead:

pQuery($url)
    ->find('h1')
    ->each(
        sub { say "Heading: " . pQuery($_)->text; }
    );

I’d love to see this continue in active development – there’s several features it could really use, but what’s already there is handy stuff!

Version 1.150 of the Dancer web framework has just been released, so this seemed like a good time to write up this post.

Recently, I’ve been wanting to find a Perl web framework that I really got on with. I’ve used Catalyst, which is very powerful and popular, but it’s quite heavy (a lot of dependencies, and reasonably high memory usage and startup time), and I felt as though it forced me to code “the Catalyst way”, rather than staying out of my way and getting on with writing my code.

I took a look around at the current Perl web frameworks (e.g. CGI-Application, Jifty, Catalyst, Mojo…) – all good in their own ways, but for various reasons, none of them really struck me as something I’d be particularly happy to work with.

I did briefly consider trying to write my own, but that’s a wheel I do not want to re-invent – there’s enough odd-shaped wheels out there already.

When I found Dancer (a port of Ruby’s Sinatra framework), I immediately liked the fact it looked simple and stays out of the way as much as possible, so I gave it a try – and, I must say, I’m impressed.
Continue reading ‘Dancer 1.150 released – a flexible, lightweight web framework for Perl’

Something I’ve wanted to do for a while is get the list of changed files and a diff into the commit message in my editor when I make a commit with Subversion.

With Git, you can pass the -v (verbose) option when committing, and the commit message you edit will include diffs as well as the list of modified files.

Subversion provides no such option, so I put together a little wrapper shell script to do this for me.

The script provides a function named svncommit (which I alias to just ‘ci’ for supreme shortness ).

When used, after the “–This line, and those below, will be ignored–” marker line, the list of files and then diffs will be inserted, as shown in the screenshot below (click for full size):

The script itself is relatively simple (it was knocked up quickly; I’ll probably improve on it sometime):

# Do an svn commit, with diffs included in the commit message
svncommit() {
 
    # Start preparing the commit message which we'll then edit
    COMMITMSG=/tmp/$USER-commitmsg
    echo > $COMMITMSG
    echo "--This line, and those below, will be ignored--" >> $COMMITMSG
    svn status "$@" >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG
 
    # Now do a diff; work out stats on lines added/removed by looking at
    # the diff, add that info, then the diff itself
    svn diff "$@"   > /tmp/$USER-svndiff
    LINESADDED=$(  grep '^+[^+]' /tmp/$USER-svndiff | wc -l)
    LINESREMOVED=$(grep '^-[^-]' /tmp/$USER-svndiff | wc -l)
    echo "Added $LINESADDED lines, removed $LINESREMOVED lines" >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG
    cat /tmp/$USER-svndiff >> $COMMITMSG
    echo >> $COMMITMSG
 
    ORIGMD5=$(md5sum $COMMITMSG)
    $VISUAL $COMMITMSG
 
    if [[ "$(md5sum $COMMITMSG)" == "$ORIGMD5" ]]; then
        echo "Commit message unchanged, commit aborted";
    else
        svn commit "$@" -F $COMMITMSG
    fi
 
    rm $COMMITMSG
    rm /tmp/$USER-svndiff
}