20040712 [CMcC]: I've written a [cost]-like tree editing language.

The fundamental idea is to require of a tree-like object a simple API [http://sharedtech.dyndns.org/~colin/treecl/docs/treeapi.xml] and use that to generate and filter a list of nodes within the tree by using methods which map or apply methods and predicates to the nodes within the node set.

The language form is very tcl-ish and quite free-form, which was entirely inspired by Cost.

I should point out, in passing, that this approach is quite non-standard, and there are other more standard approaches to the problem of searching and editing trees, such as [tdom].

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I've put up some docs and a working version of TreeCL here: http://sharedtech.dyndns.org/~colin/treecl/docs/ - [CMcC] 20040813

Included with the library are a couple of adaptors, one to give file systems tree-semantics which gives file systems treecl/cost semantics.  Beats the hell out of [[[glob]]] :)
Another adaptor is doc, which uses parsehtml and the shallow xml parser to generate trees for scanning.

I have to point out, however, this is very much a work in progress.

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'''Some Examples''' from the included doc.tcl

Create a doc given a URL:

    doc homepage -url http://sharedtech.dyndns.org/

Create a Costq query over the doc tree:

    Costq nh -tree homepage

Print only the PCDATA content of the page:

    puts "TEXT: [nh query tree content]"

Print the href attributes of all <a> tags:

    puts "A: [nh query tree withtag a attval href]"

Another way to do the same:

    puts "A2: [nh query tree hasatt href attval href]"

Print the size of the tree:

    puts "SIZE: [homepage size]"

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[Brian Theado] - 20040813 - Any chance you could package this up with all its dependencies in a starkit?  I'd like to be able to do "source treecl.kit; package require costq".  I tried to download and run it to try and understand better what it does and what it can be used for and stumbled because I don't have a recent enough tcllib (it appears to require struct packages that haven't been released and can only be found in CVS).  I can get all the dependencies myself and right now I'm not going to take the time.

[CMcC] 20040816 - Can I work on it a bit more before thinking about packaging?  I'm not sure what is needed to starkitify it.  I'm also looking at changing the file names a bit.

[Brian Theado] Also, what is needed before executing the above code? Package require treecl?  Package require costq?

[CMcC] it's lifted from the doc.tcl program, which should be instructive in this matter, but which I haven't yet documented.

[Brian Theado] For those interested in using this with tcllib's struct::tree, it appears that a small wrapper to convert the "rootname" method to "root" and add a "descendents" method, should do the trick.  Am I right?

[CMcC] I think that's so, Brian.  I've ''tried'' to keep the interface as close as possible, but I may have erred.  If someone would like to write the adaptor, I'd be happy to incorporate it.  It might even work with struct::graph, and that would make a port to [e4graph] easier too.