Treeline

Treeline turns indented-line input into a tree structure.

Given a sequence of lines with varying levels of indentation, like this:

line 1
  line 2
  line 3
    line 4
  line 5

Treeline will produce a hash like this:

{
  "line 1" => {
    "line 2" => {},
    "line 3" => {
      "line 4" => {},
    },
    "line 5" => {},
  },
}

Installation

$ gem install treeline

Usage

The parse method on Treeline::Parser does the heavy lifting.

parser = Treeline::Parser.new
tree = parser.parse lines

The parser is bone-headed simple. The first line of input is taken to be the root of a new tree. For each subsequent line, the amount of indentation is compared to the amount in the previous line, and

if the indentation is the same, the new line is added as a sibling of the previous;
if the indentation is greater, the new line is added as a child of the previous; or
if the indentation is less, the parser climbs back towards the root until one of the previous two rules applies.

parse optionally takes a block. Each line of the input will be passed to the block, which should return the line modified as desired. For instance, to force all of the text to lowercase:

parser = Treeline::Parser.new
tree = parser.parse(lines) do | line |
  line.downcase
end

The block is called before the amount of indentation is determined, so you can change the indentation if you want to.

Dependencies

None at the moment.

Support

Wiki: https://github.com/CraigCottingham/treeline/wiki

To do

Some things I'm considering adding:

Allow the first line to have leading whitespace, and strip that amount of whitespace from each subsequent line

Contributing

Treeline has been written the particular need I have right now in mind. I'm trying hard not to bulk it up with stuff that I or someone else might want someday. That being said, if you have a particular need that Treeline doesn't quite satisfy in its current state, I'm happy to consider requests or (better yet) contributions.

Here’s the most direct way to get your work merged into the project:

Fork the project.
Clone down your fork ( git clone git://github.com//treeline.git ).
Create a topic branch to contain your change ( git checkout -b my_awesome_feature ).
Hack away, add tests. Not necessarily in that order.
Make sure everything still passes by running rake test.
If necessary, rebase your commits into logical chunks, without errors.
Push the branch up ( git push origin my_awesome_feature ).
Send a pull request.