line2Chunk - nodejs program to serve line-by-line input into chunks

Summary

line2Chunk is a command line nodejs program that collects timestamped lines from its input stream into chunks of a regular timeSpan (generally) larger than the time difference between the lines which are sent to a websocket. The timeSpan is a millisecond value sent from the client web page (defaults to 1 sec). Timestamps from the input stream are assumed to be the first field of each line. The timeSpan can be changed by the consuming web client.

line2Chunk was written as a way to provide piped pping output to a web client visualizer but can be used to "chunk" any line-by-line output stream with a first field timestamp where the chunks cover some time span specified by the client.

Usage

line2Chunk requires nodejs (https://nodejs.org) and the packages 'ws' and 'websocket-stream'.

pping -i interface -m | node.js line2Chunk.js OR cat [some file of ppings] | node.js line2Chunk.js

then either "open index.html" from command line or navigate to index.html from localhost web page. (This can be used with ppvizCLI.html from Pollere's in-progress ppviz project for the adventurous.)

Note that the input to this file doesn't have to be ppings, just any source of lines with a first field of time in seconds.
A simple test can be peformed by executing the command line:

cat tst.pp | node line2Chunk.js

And then open index.html in a browser window. The browser window will display and scroll the output lines. index.html can be used with pping to view its output in a browswer window and can also be used as a template for more sophisticated client viewers.

Examples

See Also

pping at https://github/pollere/pping. ppviz at https://github/pollere/ppviz.

Author

Kathleen Nichols nichols@pollere.net.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2018, Kathleen Nichols nichols@pollere.net.

Licensed under the GNU GPLv3. See LICENSE for more details.