Introduction

The goal of this program is to take an input from the command line, either by piping the output of a program through the parser or by listening to the output of a program, and format the output according to specific rules that are defined through a JSON input file.

Installation

To compile dotify, simply run

make

and you should be good to go. Note that this requires a C++ compiler that is compatible with the 2014 C++ standard. Or, if you feel a bit adventurous try the following magic lines:

meson build && ninja -C build

(your future self will thank you for learning meson, honestly! ...). More info: https://mesonbuild.com/Quick-guide.html

Run

To use dotify on a static text file, you can use the following syntax

cat textFileToParse | /path/to/dotify -f /path/to/inputFile.json

Alternatively you can run dotify on the output of a different program to parse its output

/path/to/programm | tee log | /path/to/dotify -f /path/to/inputFile.json

Example

To test the usage, try the following command (assuming dotify has been compiled into the bin directory)

cat examples/templates.txt | tee log | bin/dotify -f input/ninja.json

you may wish to compare the output against the examples/templates.txt file.

Command line arguments

The following command line arguments are supported

• -h,--help Prints the help with short description of argumentes and usage
• -f,--file Path to the JSON input file. Without this, dotify will effectively just print the text that it receives.
• -k,--keywordsOnly Only print string to screen if it contains one of the keywords specified in the JSON file. This is useful if a lot of additional lines are printed that are difficult or cumbersome to suppress through the ignoreCompleteLineIfItContainsSubstring property (see JSON file explanation)

Input file for formatting text

The following shows the basic structure of the input file with simple examples, provided in JSON format

{
  "ignoreCompleteLineIfItContainsSubstring" : [
    "should be suppressed"
  ],
  "ignoreContentBetweenDelimiter" : [
    {
      "startingDelimiter" : "<",
      "endingDelimiter" : ">",
      "replaceContentBy" : "..."
    }
  ],
  "styleLineContainingKeywords" : [
    {
      "keyword" : "error",
      "removeDuplicates" : true,
      "applyStyle" : "onKeyword",
      "color" : "red",
      "style" : "bold"
    }
  ]
}

Suppose the above is stored as "example.json", consider the following example

name@pc:~$ printf "This string should be suppressed\nerror when compiling file containing container::data<std::vector<int>, std::vector<double>>\nerror when compiling file conng container::data<std::vector<int>, std::vector<double>>\n" > log
name@pc:~$ cat log
This string should be suppressed
error when compiling file containing container::data<std::vector<int>, std::vector<double>>
error when compiling file containing container::data<std::vector<int>, std::vector<double>>
name@pc:~$ cat log | /path/to/dotify -f /path/to/example.json

There are 3 sections that can be specified in the input file, which are

• ignoreCompleteLineIfItContainsSubstring: In here comes a list of all strings that should be removed from the output. A string will be removed from the output as long as parts of the string match one of the statements in this list.

• ignoreContentBetweenDelimiter: This property defines delimiters which are used to suppress content between those delimiters. Unlike the ignoreCompleteLineIfItContainsSubstring property, this only acts locally on strings between the delimiter. Furthermore, we can provide two additional arguments replaceContentBy and mustContain, which provide fine grained control over the content between the delimiters.

  • replaceContentBy defines the string which will be printed instead of the actual content between the delimiters, if this entry is not provided, it will default to "...".
  • mustContain specifies a string that must be included between the delimiters if the content is to be replaced. This is useful if there are several delimiters of the same type but with different content between those. Regular expressions are currently not allowed for performance reasons.

• styleLineContainingKeywords This list defines keywords and how they should be formatted when printed to screen. In the above example the keyword is error, which should be printed in red using a bold formatting for the text. A complete list of allowed entries is as follows:

  • keyword This is the keyword to be matched. If the keyword is encountered in a string, the line will be formated according to the parameters set for this keyword.
  • removeDuplicates A boolean flag indicating if duplicate entries should be shown or removed from the output. This is useful for cyclic dependencies where the same message may be printed more than once. As shown in the example above, strings that are identical will not be printed twice if this flag is set to true.
  • applyStyle This entry determines how the formatting should be applied to the line, specifically, it determines which portion of the string are colored and formatted. The following entries are supported:
    • preKeyword Everything before the keyword will be formatted.
    • onKeyword Only the keyword will be formatted.
    • postKeyword Everything after the keyword will be formatted.
    • everywhere Everything (on current line) will be formatted, as long as the string contains the keyword.
  • color This is the color which the text should take, the following colors are supported:
    • neutral (default background color)
    • red
    • green
    • yellow
    • blue
    • magenta
    • cyan
  • format This is the formatting that should be applied to the text, the following entries are supported:
    • normal (default text formatting)
    • bold
    • dim (darker than base color)
    • underline
    • blink (flashing text)

Example

now let's consider a small but real life example. Suppose we have the following file that we want to put through dotify:

[1/4] Compiling src/foo.cpp
[2/4] Compiling src/bar.cpp
/home/user/project/include/bar.hpp:107: warning: argument 'value' of command @param is not found in the argument list
../include/bar.hpp:120:22: warning: unused variable ‘value’ [-Wunused-variable]
[3/4] Linking lib/libBaz.so
../include/temp.hpp: In instantiation of ‘void myNamespace::myTempClass<myContainerType>::myTempFunction(std::vector<dataContainer> &) const [with dataContainer = myNamespace::dataContainer<std::map<int, std::string>, std::vector<std::array<myArray<double, specialisedDataContainer<std::vector<double>>>>, 3>>]’:
src/temp2.cpp:21:1:   required from here
../include/temp2.hpp:345:23: error: ‘using MyContainer = std::conditional<true, std::vector<double>, std::vector<int> >::type {aka class std::vector<double>}’ has no member named ‘bbegin’
  std::fill(genericContainer.bbegin(), genericContainer.end(), 0.0);
Build failed
  -> task in 'tempProject' failed with exit status 1 (run with -v to display more information)

and we have a corresponding input file like so:

{
  "ignoreCompleteLineIfItContainsSubstring" : [
    "is not found in the argument list"
  ],
  "ignoreContentBetweenDelimiter" : [
    {
      "startingDelimiter" : "<",
      "endingDelimiter" : ">",
      "replaceContentBy" : "..."
    }
  ],
  "styleLineContainingKeywords" : [
    {
      "keyword" : "warning",
      "removeDuplicates" : true,
      "applyStyle" : "onKeyword",
      "color" : "magenta",
      "style" : "bold"
    },
    {
      "keyword" : "error",
      "removeDuplicates" : true,
      "applyStyle" : "onKeyword",
      "color" : "red",
      "style" : "bold"
    },
    {
      "keyword" : "Compiling",
      "applyStyle" : "postKeyword",
      "color" : "green"
    },
    {
      "keyword" : "Linking",
      "applyStyle" : "postKeyword",
      "color" : "yellow"
    },
    {
      "keyword" : "Build failed",
      "applyStyle" : "everywhere",
      "color" : "red",
      "style" : "bold"
    },
    {
      "keyword" : "failed with exit status",
      "applyStyle" : "everywhere",
      "removeDuplicates" : true,
      "color" : "red",
      "style" : "bold"
    }
  ]
}

Running the above text through dotify using

user@pc:~$ cat /path/to/logFile | /path/to/dotify -f /path/to/inputFile.json

will result in the following output:

We may further wish to suppress clutter by only printing strings that contain keywords. We use the -k command line argument for this. Thus, our command becomes

user@pc:~$ cat /path/to/logFile | /path/to/dotify -k -f /path/to/inputFile.json

and our output