find conversion

[jbenet]

Should be able to search the type system and find the right conversion.

Trivial example:

echo '127.0.0.1' | transform ip-address hex
# ip-address -> ip-address-buffer -> hex
# ip-address [str] -> [str] ip-address-buffer [buffer] -> [buffer] hex [str]

[jbenet]

(type inference)

[jbenet]

Thinking more about how conversion resolution should happen. As of now, we can pipe types together, and transformer will look at adjacent conversions. For example, this works:

> echo '1399425045' | transform number integer unix-time js-date iso-date
2014-05-07T01:10:45.000Z

But it should really be usable like this:

> echo '1399425045' | transform unix-time iso-date
2014-05-07T01:10:45.000Z

This requires resolving unix-time iso-date -> string number integer unix-time js-date iso-date string. This is doable because the available transformer modules will be in npm (and tagged properly). So currently, the process looks like:

1. list transformer modules on npm*
2. build a graph, where types are nodes and conversions are directed edges. (levelgraph?)
3. find shortest paths. either use shortest, or prompt user to select one. (both use cases will be wanted)

For 1 above, this is a really good use case for dat. Can have a dat-npm-transformer that filters out only transformer related modules, and serves the data to transformer clients.

---

How to find transformer modules on npm? Currently:

• their package.json will have a "transformer" key.
• their name follows: transformer.<id>[.whatever]. (e.g. transformer.iso-date-to-string and transformer.iso-date-to-string.fast)

[jbenet]

When the time comes, this will be done in https://github.com/jbenet/transformer-resolve