strutils

Unix-like interfaces to Python string manipulation utilities.

Many of these scripts were originally developed on my startup-config repository as part of scripts to be included in my custom $HOME/bin PATH directory. They have been moved to their own repository to separate concerns. Furthermore, Python's setuptools provides a convenient way to install command line scripts.

Setup

REQUIREMENT: Python 3.10+

The scripts are mostly standalone but are bundled as a Python package to make distribution and installation more convenient. To install it globally on your machine:

git clone https://github.com/vinlin24/strutils.git
make install

This adds the scripts to your PATH such that you can use them like ordinary shell commands.

You can sync the scripts with upstream changes by pulling and installing again:

cd /path/to/strutils
git pull origin main
make install

Usage

ord

Apply Python's ord() on all the characters within the input string, with support for different bases, such as hexadecimal, octal, and binary, as well as the option of including their respective prefixes (0x, 0o, 0b).

EXAMPLES:

$ ord -x "hello there"
68 65 6c 6c 6f 20 74 68 65 72 65

$ echo -e "hello\nthere" | ord -ep
h   e   l   l   o   \n  t   h   e   r   e   \n
104 101 108 108 111 010 116 104 101 114 101 010

$ ord lmao -1 | awk 'BEGIN {s=0} {s += $1} END {print s}'
425

NOTE: If you supply multiple strings as a whitespace-separated list at the command line, it will be interpreted as the concatenation of the strings with no whitespace joining them. Use quoting to preserve whitespace in your shell script.

chr

Apply Python's chr() on all the input numbers, with support for different bases, such as hexadecimal, octal, and binary, by inferring from their respective prefixes (0x, 0o/0, 0b) or with a flag.

EXAMPLES:

$ chr 65 66 67
A B C

$ chr -e 0x50 0x52 0x4F
80 82 79
P  R  O

$ chr -d _ $(seq 68 75)
D_E_F_G_H_I_J_K

TODO: Improvements to be made. Some options or combination of options do not yet work as intended.

spread

Spread out the tokens and characters within a token of an input string.

The tokenization of the input string is as follows:

• If provided as command line arguments, they are treated directly as the tokens to use. This means you should watch out for the quoting and whitespace rules of the shell used to invoke this script.
• If provided through stdin, the input is tokenized according to the rule of Python's str.split() method (unless -1/--one-token is provided, which forces the input to be treated as a single string).

EXAMPLES:

$ ./spread hello there
h e l l o   t h e r e

$ echo -e 'general\tkenobi' | ./spread --char-sep _ --word-sep ' '
g_e_n_e_r_a_l k_e_n_o_b_i

snippet

Convert the contents of a text stream into a JSON array of strings that can be pasted into the "body" field of a VS Code snippets file.

EXAMPLES:

$ snippet
#!/usr/bin/env ${1:python3}
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
$0
^D
[
    "#!/usr/bin/env ${1:python3}",
    "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-",
    "$0"
]

$ ./snippet header.txt --indent 2 --prefix header
"prefix": "header",
"body": [
  "#!/usr/bin/env ${1:python3}",
  "# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-",
  "\"\"\"${TM_FILENAME}",
  "",
  "${2:_description_}",
  "\"\"\"",
  "$0"
]

NOTE: You can pipe the output of this script into a command like clip to automatically save it to your clipboard.

mock

Convert an input string into a version with alternating capitalization as used in sarcastic texting.

EXAMPLES:

$ mock hello there
hElLo ThErE

$ echo -e 'hello\tthere\ngeneral\tkenobi' | mock
hElLo   ThErE
gEnErAl KeNoBi

NOTE: If multiple strings are provided as separate command line arguments, they will be subject to the shell parsing rules. The script has no way of knowing the whitespace originally used to separate the arguments, so it will assume to join them with single spaces. To preserve whitespace, use quoting.

NOTE: This is a Python port of my original mock.c program, which can be found in the commit history of my startup-config repository.

len

Compute the length of each string. For most purposes, just saves a few keystrokes from the more versatile echo -n "$string" | wc pattern, but also serves as a way to apply the counting on EACH input token.

EXAMPLES:

$ len "hello there"
11

$ len general kenobi you are a bold one
7 6 3 3 1 4 3

$ len -1 -- separate lines please
8
5
6

$ len -t -- there are 5 tokens here
5

NOTE: "Tokens" are determined by how the shell running this script parses the input at the command line. If you intend a string with whitespace to be parsed as one token, be sure to follow your shell's quoting rules. Reading from stdin always treats the string as one token.