Programming

CodeRunner is one of my favourite development environments on macOS. I use it for small one-off projects or for testing concepts for integration into larger projects. But in version 4.0.3, jQuery injection in a custom HTML page is broken, giving the error:

It’s probably due to some unescaped bit of code in their minified jQuery, but I didn’t have time to work that hard. Instead I reported the error to the developer an fixed it myself. The original (default) run script for jQuery is:

As readers of this blog know, I’m an avid user of Anki to learn Russian. I have a number of sources for reference content that go onto my Anki cards. Notably, I use Wiktionary to get word definitions and the word with the proper syllabic stress marked. (This is an aid to pronunciation for Russian language learners.)

Since I’m lazy to the core, I came up with a system way of grabbing the stress-marked word from the Wiktionary page using lxml and XPath.

Custom aliases in oh-my-zsh

With oh-my-zsh, you can store custom aliases in multiple (?per application) file under .oh-my-zsh/custom giving them .zsh file extensions.¹

¶For example, in my hugo.zsh file, I have:

alias hnewtil="/Users/alan/Documents/blog/ojisan/scripts/newtil.sh"
alias gtojisan="cd /Users/alan/Documents/blog/ojisan; ls -l;"

Executing inline Python in a shell script

It’s possible using the -c command.²

python -c 'import foo; foo.bar()'

W3schools.com has a CSS library that’s quite nice. I often use Bootstrap; but I like some of the visual features here better. For example, I like their tags because they have more flexible use of colour.

If you want to fetch from a Python dictionary, but you need a default value, this is how you do it:

upos_badge = {'noun': 'lime','verb': 'amber', 'adv': 'blue',}
badge_class_postfix = upos_badge.get(value.lower(), 'light-grey')

I recently learned about DeepL as an alternative to Google Translate. It seems really good.

Anki and some other platforms use a particular format to signify cloze deletions in flashcard text. It has a format like any of the following:

• {{c1::dog::}}
• {{c2::dog::domestic canine}}

Here’s a regular expression that matches the content of cloze deletions in an arbitrary string, keeping only the main clozed word (in this case dog.)

{{c\d::(.*?)(::[^:]+)?}}

To see it in action, here it is in action in a Python script:

import re

def stripCloze(searchText):
    return re.sub(r'{{c\d::(.*?)(::[^:]+)?}}', r"\1", searchText)

print(stripCloze("The {{c1::passengers::tourist riders}} spotted a breaching {{c2::whale}}."))

It should return The passengers spotted a breaching whale.

Previously, I wrote about adding syllabic stress marks to Russian text. Here’s a method for doing the opposite - that is, removing such marks (ударение) from Russian text.

Although there may well be a more sophisticated approach, regex is well-suited to this task. The problem is that

def string_replace(dict,text):
   sorted_dict = {k: dict[k] for k in sorted(dict)}
   for n in sorted_dict.keys():
      text = text.replace(n,dict[n])
   return text

dict = { "а́" : "а", "е́" : "е", "о́" : "о", "у́" : "у",
      "я́" : "я", "ю́" : "ю", "ы́" : "ы", "и́" : "и",
      "ё́" : "ё", "А́" : "А", "Е́" : "Е", "О́" : "О",
      "У́" : "У", "Я́" : "Я", "Ю́" : "Ю", "Ы́" : "Ы",
      "И́" : "И", "Э́" : "Э", "э́" : "э"
   } 
   
print(string_replace(dict, "Существи́тельные в шве́дском обычно де́лятся на пять склоне́ний."))

This should print: Существительные в шведском обычно делятся на пять склонений.

The AppleScript Safari API is apparently quite finicky and rejects Russian Cyrillic characters when loading URLs.

For example, the following URL https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/стоять#Russian throws an error in AppleScript. Instead, Safari requires URL’s of the form https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%8F%D1%82%D1%8C#Russian whereas Chrome happily consumes whatever comes along. So, we just need to encode the URL thusly:

use framework "Foundation"

-- encode Cyrillic test as "%D0" type strings
on urlEncode(input)
   tell current application's NSString to set rawUrl to stringWithString_(input)
   -- 4 is NSUTF8StringEncoding
   set theEncodedURL to rawUrl's stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:4 
   return theEncodedURL as Unicode text
end urlEncode

When researching Russian words for vocabulary study, I use the URL encoding handler to load the appropriate words into several reference sites in sequential Safari tabs.

While largely opaque to most users, Facebook and Google massage any links that you acquire on their sites to include data used to track you around the web. This script attempts to strip these surveillance parameters from the URL’s. It is by no means all-inclusive. Imaginably, there are links that I haven’t yet encountered and that need to be considered in a future version. So consider this a proof-of-concept.

The problem

For example, I performed a Google search¹ for “Smarties”. Inspecting the first link - to Wikipedia, I see:

As part of a Hazel rule to process downloaded mp3 files, I worked out a couple different methods for extracting the ID3 title tag. Not rocket science, but it took a little time to sort out. Both rely on non-standard third-party tools, both for parsing the text and for extracting the ID3 tags.

Extracting ID3 title with ffprobe

ffprobe is part of the ffmpeg suite of tools which on macOS can be installed with Homebrew. If you don’t have the latter, go install it now; because it opens up so many tools for your use. In this case, it makes ffmpeg available via brew install ffmpeg.