WIP : First draft for #31

[kunal-mohta]

This is a first draft for #31

I have used the syntax as topic:site because ~ is an invalid character. If you still want it to be used, we can change it to a valid character.

Currently I have not randomized the order, instead I have predefined the order in the array randomOrder. I will randomize it when other things are finalized.

[fdb]

Thanks for the change, but this is not exactly what I meant.

There are no fixed names called ":site" or ":one", these are just example variable names, like "foo" or "hamburger". Importantly, you can make more of them. Imagine you're making a news site generator, you could have one single unique topic ordering for the main articles and one unique topic ordering for the sidebar. (so topic:~main and topic:~sidebar)

So topic:one and topic:~one should both be supported. I chose the ~ character since it resembles the NOT operator in C/C++.

[kunal-mohta]

Oh!! I was also wondering that why I isn't there a one keyword! :sweat_smile: So the user has the liberty to specify these names ( one, site, etc. ) Are they given names so they can be used elsewhere? What I mean to ask is what is the reason that user has to provide a name, why not simply write topic: and topic:~?

[fdb]

I agree, sometimes it's difficult to think of a name because there will be only one of those things. That's why we use the "one" or "site" placeholder name. However, I would still require them to give a note, just to avoid overly cryptic special-characters-only syntax. We don't want to end up as Perl :-)

[kunal-mohta]

:+1: Let me try and implement it this way then.

[kunal-mohta]

@fdb I am facing some problem with making ~ a valid character. Can you help me with it?

[fdb]

Huh why? Is this a regex thing?

[kunal-mohta]

I don't think so. Initially I get this error -

Invalid character ~ at position 13 in phrase '<h2>{{ topic:~ }}</h2>'.

So I made a new const TILDEN = '~'; along with these. And added its handling at places that I felt are relevant like this and this Which led me to the error -

Invalid syntax: expected end of reference at position 14, but encountered ~ instead.

[kunal-mohta]

Okay, I think I figured this out. I will have to include the case for ~ here too, which currently only checks for ALPHANUM.

[kunal-mohta]

@fdb Does this look similar to what you actually wanted?

[fdb]

@kunal-mohta I appreciate the work, but it's not ready yet: the ordering still needs to happen and some of the code is a bit sloppy (ie. double equals instead of triple equals — read why).

I would ask to please only make a PR when you have a finished, working implementation. We're a small research team and we don't have the resources to guide this process every step of the way.

[kunal-mohta]

@fdb I understand. Sorry for the inconvenience.