I am currently teaching a course on programming for linguists. We are using python, but for the first few classes, I have been going over some standard UNIX utilities like cd, ls and such, plus using regular expressions with grep and sed. I actually don’t use sed that much. I tend to reach for perl, since I know it better, and it can do pretty much all the same stuff that sed can plus much more. But sed is simpler […] (Read more)

I just released version 0.6.1. This update is mostly bug fixes introduced in 0.6. I apologize for all the bugs in 0.6. It was a major rewrite, and I expected bugs, but probably should have labeled it alpha. I want to especially thank Hans Klaus for doing quite a bit of testing in 0.6.1, including testing the formatting with several different themes. Here is the changelog for 0.6.1: Improved styling so that collapsing and expanding symbols use a fixed-width font, […] (Read more)

It seems like whenever I go to slurp in a whole file into a string in Perl, I have to search around to remember the exact syntax. So I decided to put it here for myself, so I won’t have to search any further than my own site. In this particular instance, I am trying to remove any <span> blocks from a file. I can simply do the following: perl -e '$string = do {local( $/ ); }; $string=~s/.*?//gs; print […] (Read more)

I finally figured out this thorny issue I have been dealing with for the last hour. In perl, if I can create a character class like “[\[\]a-f]” which matches any characters a-f, [, and ]. This does not work in grep or sed though. I finally discovered that the right bracket “]” should not be escaped in grep or sed. I don’t really understand why. Perl will let you do it either way. You know what they say: “knowing is […]

I have just a pretty major revision to collapsing categories, version 0.6. It includes the following changes: Can have multiple instances of widgets, each with separate options No longer works as non-widget All options are stored in one database row Added more sorting options Added option to include or exclude certain categories Added option to expand certain categories by default Added option to have category names either link to category archive or to activate expanding and collapsing I realized this […] (Read more)