Subject: Re: Creating files with testdata

From: H <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 17:09:46 -0400

On March 10, 2025 3:22:41 PM GMT-04:00, Francisco Olarte <[email-masked]> wrote:
>On Mon, 10 Mar 2025 at 19:17, H <[email-masked]> wrote:
>...
>> After entering my test data into the markdown file for the given test
>scenario, I would then run an awk script or similar to create a SQL
>file with the various CTE INSERT statements. Howevever, it gets complex
>since I need to handle 1:N relationships between tables in the markdown
>file...
>> I hope the above outline is understandable and am interested in
>comments and thoughts on my above approach.
>
>I do not think MD would be a good source format. Being a developer I
>would recommend taking your favorite scripting language ( perl /
>python / lua / js , whatever ), build a big object ( which can be
>easily helped by some mini-functions to build a little DSL ) and then
>spit sql from it ( for developemewnt it is normally better then using
>whatever db connection your language has, as it leaves an
>understandable sql script ).
>
>I have done this with perl for some projects, built a driver which
>defined several helper functions, then dofile("xx.dat") which returned
>a big hash and then a series of loops on the result to write the SQL
>in whatever order was neccessary.
>
>Francisco Olarte.

The plan is to use the same format for later adding information into the finished application. By the way, all information is text, either paragraphs, sentences or single words.

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From: H <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2025 17:13:33 -0400

On March 10, 2025 5:09:46 PM GMT-04:00, H <[email-masked]> wrote:
>The plan is to use the same format for later adding information into
>the finished application. By the way, all information is text, either
>paragraphs, sentences or single words.

I am also contemplating using Pandoc to process the markdown file. Pandoc builds an AST which can then be processed as desired. Awk processes a file line-by-line which is not ideal.