Chew or chewlang is intended to be a high-level programming language and code generator with heavy emphasis on regular expressions and anticipated use in data scraping.

This port compiles down to Python 3.

Design priorities:

• Short, readable code
• Ease of learning (esp. being incrementally useful)
• Modelled after natural English usage
• Experimental introduction of "contexts" to replace/unify flow control and parameters

Online demo

A quick live demo of the Perl port can be found at http://chewlang.com

Syntax

Obligatory statements

• Reading filename

  • This tells chew which file to open. You may specify an http or https URL instead (experimental, dependencies may change). The Reading statement must be the first line of a chew file.

• Output format

  • Obligatory statement to specify output format. The first supported format is "tsv+header". The Output statement must be the last line of a chew file.

A few essential commands ("verbs")

      NB This is an introductory list. More than shown here is currently supported and will be added with documentation and examples in due course. However, this selection should serve to illustrate how chew can do a lot with a few short commands.

• Starting at /expression/

  • Can be used to indicate that nothing on or after a line matching the Starting at expression should be processed. The expression should be a regular expression. The Starting statement is not obligatory.

• Stopping at /expression/

  • Can be used to indicate that nothing prior to a line matching the Stopping at expression should be processed. The expression should be a regular expression. The Stopping statement is not obligatory.

• Matching /expression/

  • Only lines matching expression should be processed.

• Splitting at /expression/

  • This divides a line into chunks using expression as a divider. Splitting must be followed by one or several Take statements.

• Take number as outputname

  • This preserves the chunk indicated by number (starting at 0 for the first chunk, such as the beginning of a line). In output, the chunk will then appear in a column whose heading is outputname.

Dependencies

• Perl 5 (earlier versions untested)
• Getopt::Long
• Python 3.7 (other Python versions untested)
• Python libraries requests, urllib.request, re