Not shy at all...

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Bob Nelson <bobnelson at mac.com> wrote:
> ...so let's dive in with both feet.
> 
> HyperCard was my friend - and remained my friend
> until the advent of OS X
> and a new machine that won't boot into OS 9.x any
> more.  Sad, since I used
> it for all sorts of cool tricks, especially the
> massaging of copious amounts
> of data that needed a good "cleaning" before
> dropping it into MySQL or
> FileMaker.
> 

Hi Bob,

Welcome to the Revolution -- and for the sort of work
you're doing, it is an excellent choice ; the URL
library makes it easy to read data, and the database
library allows you to connect to MySQL directly and to
FMPro via web-calls or ODBC.

> A new project came along and prompted me to go
> hunting.  One of the old
> HyperCard sites recommended Revolution or SuperCard,
> so I've been demo'ing
> Revolution for a couple of days to see how the
> package operates compared to
> other options - including RealBASIC.
> 
> So I've got a little script that does a moderately
> simple thing:  Grab a web
> page, bring it back, strip useless data out of it
> (right now, I've just got
> it stripping out the extra returns and leading
> spaces per line) and the next
> step will be to kill the HTML on the page so I can
> mine the data...
> 
> My layout and code are fairly simple:
> 
> Two fields and two buttons so I can work through the
> example - the first
> field is the 'holder' of the remote URL which has
> been retrieved
> (Imported_Raw) and the second field will be the
> restructured output when I'm
> done.
> 
> Here's the code, for those who want to dive
> deeper...
> 
> on mouseUp
>   put 0 into i
>   repeat forever
>     add 1 to i
>     if char 1 of line i of field "Imported_Raw" is
> numToChar(13) then
>       delete line i of field "Imported_Raw"
>       put "Ate one return at line " & i & " of " &
> the number of lines of
> field "Imported_Raw" & " total lines."
>       subtract 1 from i
>     end if
>     repeat while char 1 of line i of field
> "Imported_Raw" = " "
>       delete char 1 of line i of field
> "Imported_Raw"
>       put "Ate one space at line " & i & " of " &
> the number of lines of
> field "Imported_Raw" & " total lines."
>     end repeat
>     if line i of field "Imported_Raw" is the last
> line of field
> "Imported_Raw" then
>       exit repeat
>     end if
>   end repeat  
>   
> end mouseUp
> 

Allow me to optimize this script :-)

--
on mouseUp
  -- copy the field data into a variable
  put field "Imported_Raw" into tData
  -- calculate the number of lines once
  put the number of lines of tData into tNumLines
  -- initialise line tracker variable
  put 0 into i
  -- use the speedy 'repeat for each' construct
  repeat for each line tLine in tData
    -- update the progress
    add 1 to i
    if i MOD 100 = 1 then
      -- show progress
      put "Processing line" && i &&"of" && tNumLines
    end if
    -- skip the line if it's empty
    if tLine is empty then next repeat
    -- eat the leading and trailing spaces
    put word 1 to -1 of tLine into tLine
    -- append this bit to a different variable
    put tLine & return after tCleanData
  end repeat
end mouseUp
--

> 
> Here's what I noticed about execution:
> 
> 1.  Importing the URL is awesome - a great feature
> that makes my life soooo
> much easier for this project!  And fast, too!

Yup, it's a life saver :-)

> 2.  The page I grabbed consisted of 140,000 lines of
> code.  After removing
> extra line feeds, the number of lines is around
> 80,000.

Not too shabby, but certainly not beyond Revolution's
capabilities.

> 3.  This script runs VERY slow, compared to
> relatively the same script in
> HyperCard running under 9.2.1 -- as an example,
> Revolution has been running
> this script for more than 18 hours and still hasn't
> finished processing.
> (And that's running on a Dual 2 GHz, 4 Gb RAM, OS X
> most current version
> with all updates.)  Under HC, the similar script
> executed in about an hour -
> running on an iMac G3/233 with 1 Gb and OS 9.2.1 --
> any comments regarding
> execution speed?

The version I produced should require far less
overhead and zip along at a very good speed.
The main problem with your approach was that it
constantly updates the data in your field, which
results in a redraw ; plus, you're asking the
processor to calculate the number of lines numerous
times, and to find the offset of line i.

> 4.  I don't see any mechanisms for determining
> progress of the operation --
> although I may have certainly missed something.  Are
> there any progress
> bars, etc., that one can use in Revolution?

There are "progress bar" controls ; see the following
recent mailing list posts on how to use them :
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/2004-June/037480.html>
<http://lists.runrev.com/pipermail/use-revolution/2004-June/037484.html>

> 5.  Looking through all the examples I can find, as
> well as documentation, I
> noted that there aren't many examples related to
> text manipulation - and
> importing/exporting text, etc., in/out of your
> stack.  I'm sure I missed
> something on this front, as I'm sure people would be
> doing this all the
> time...  Can anyone point me in a direction?
> 

I hope the above helped ; but make sure to browse
through the entire documentation, as you'll find a
Cookbook with examples.

> Finally, I'm impressed with the professional layout
> of the product - this
> could well be the perfect 'update' (I'm sure they
> don't like to hear that at
> Rev!) to HyperCard.  I'm looking forward to a book,
> like The Complete
> HyperCard Handbook, that lays out the functionality
> of Revolution as an
> awesome reference book.
> 

There's Dan Shafer's book : "Revolution : SOftware at
the speed of thought" ; for more information :
<http://www.runrev.com/resources/shaferbook.shtml>

> Thanks for your time!
> 
> Bob
> 

Hope this helped,

Jan Schenkel.

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)


	
		
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