In an earlier post I provided code demonstrating my “functional” Perl idiom. The purpose of that code was to take a very simply formatted text file and to turn it into LaTeX Beamer formatting.
Well, recently I found the application iFlipr. In addition to being a site where you can upload flash cards, it also has an iTouch / iPhone version so that you can review when you’re in the bus, in a waiting room, etc.
So, I needed some code to transform my generic data set into–not LaTex–but iFlipr format. With but the most trivial of changes, I was able to accomplish this. The high readability of “functional” Perl made this, literally, a 3 minute affair.
Here’s the diff:
< &produce_beamer_body(
—-
> &produce_iflipr_body(
81c81
< sub produce_beamer_body
—-
> sub produce_iflipr_body
83c83
< (my $latex_output_file = $_[0]->{file} ) =~ s/..*$// ;
—-
> (my $iflipr_output_file = $_[0]->{file} ) =~ s/..*$// ;
85,93c85,86
< open (LATEX, ">$latex_output_file.tex");
<
< # A technique to tell Perl not to paginate
< # ( i.e. re-print LATEX_TOP format ) again
<
< my $ltx = select LATEX;
< $= = 9990;
< select $ltx;
<
—-
> open (IFLIPR, ">$iflipr_output_file.iflipr.txt");
>
96,97c89
< my @order = sort { $a <=> $b } ( keys ( %$ds ) );
< for ( @order )
—-
> for ( keys %$ds )
100,103c92,93
< $part = $ds->{$_}[1];
< $meaning = $ds->{$_}[2];
< chomp($word, $part, $meaning);
< write (LATEX);
—-
> $meaning = $ds->{$_}[2];
> print IFLIPR "$word\t$meaning\n";
105,107c95,96
<
< print LATEX $end_of_document;
< close LATEX;
—-
>
> close IFLIPR;
If you’ve not thought about writing code in this fashion, I hope this entices you! Either that or we should all take up Haskell or Lisp “Lisp (programming language) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”)
