Wednesday, June 03, 2020

Viewing Data Records As Forms --- Old Is Gold

Viewing Data Records As Forms: Old Is Gold!

1 Executive Summary

Given a file containing data records made up of multiple fields, you
can easily view them using Emacs' forms library.


2 Background: BBC Program Listings

I use Perl utility get_player to fetch details of BBC Radio
programs. When I was using this frequently, I had installed package
iplayer.el from Melpa — that package presented the data as a
nicely organized Org document. Time passed, and I somehow stopped
using it, until … last week. Then I discovered that package
iplayer on Melpa hadn't been updated in a few years, and worse had
broken because package org no longer includes now obsoleted
sub-module orgstruct.



3 Task: Viewing BBC Program Listings

When I realized package iplayer was broken, I tried to make up for
its loss for a few days by using shell-level utilities like cut. But
then I missed the convenience of being able to work with the data with
all of Emacs' power and was initially tempted to write a new package
— after all, how hard is it to take a record, split it into fields
and display it in a desired form? Fortunately, I remembered another of
my favorite edicts from the creator of Perl (Larry Wall) 

Lazy Programmer Is A Good Programmer


At the same time I had a strong sense of dejavu — in the early daysa
of Emacspeak (approx 1995), I remembered demonstrating the power of
Emacs to manipulate and display data records by using file
/etc/passwd as an example.


4 The Free Solution

So the completely free (AKA zero-work) solution I used was to leverage
Emacs' built-in forms library — the solution
as created
in
get-iplayer.el is below:




(setq forms-read-only t)
(setq forms-file (expand-file-name "~/.get_iplayer/radio.cache"))
(setq forms-number-of-fields 16)
(setq forms-field-sep "|")
(setq forms-format-list
      (list
       "Id: "  1 "\t" "Name: " 3 "\n"
       "Episode: " 4 "\t" "Description: "  12 "\n"))


With the above in place, you can:


  1. M-x forms-find-file RET get-iplayer.el
  2. This displays one record at a time as specified by forms-format-list.
  3. You can search through records etc.

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