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Overview and Documentation

A-Parser uses the Template Toolkit template engine for formatting requests and results. The template engine allows you to generate a final string (for example, requests or results) according to the rules specified in the template. Template Toolkit has many features:

  • Support for conditions and loops
  • Support for regular variables (scalars), arrays, and hashes (associative arrays)
  • Support for methods for variables (string length, search and replace, array size...)
  • Support for plugins and filters (output and formatting of date and time, generation of HTML elements...)

Example of using the template engine​

Official Template Toolkit Documentation​

One of the great advantages of this template engine is the availability of full documentation in Russian and English. Below are links to the most important sections of the documentation:

  • Introduction - general information
  • Syntax - rules and style of writing templates
  • Directives - conditions, loops, filters, plugins, and macros
  • Variables - access and update of variable, array, and hash values
  • Virtual Methods - predefined functions for processing variables, arrays, and hashes
  • Plugins and Filters - advanced capabilities of the template engine, A-Parser supports the following plugins:
    • Date - for generating formatted date strings
    • Dumper - output of data structure dump
    • Format - for creating formatting functions based on the printf syntax
    • HTML - for creating HTML elements and escaping HTML code
    • Filter - for creating and using filters defined and available through plugin loading
    • Math - for using any mathematical functions
    • String - implements additional methods for working with strings
    • Table - for representing data in the form of a table
    • URL - for building links
    • Wrap - for formatting paragraphs
    • Iterator - for traversing a set of data. The iterator is implicitly created by the FOREACH directive. This plugin allows you to create an iterator explicitly with the specified name

Usage Examples​

Examples of frequently used templates

Example of using the Math plugin​

Randomly select the specified number of links:

[% limit = 5;
USE Math;
FOREACH i IN [1..5];
   n = Math.rand(intlinks.size);
   intlinks.$n.link _ "\n";
END %]

Example of using the FOREACH loop​

Output all links and their positions from the $serp array:

[% FOREACH item IN p1.serp;
   loop.count _ ' - ' _ item.link _ "\n";
END %]

Example of using the WHILE loop​

Output 5 anchors from the $serp array, starting with the 3rd:

[% n = 2;
WHILE n < 7;
   p1.serp.${n}.anchor _ "\n";
   n = n + 1;
END %]

Example of using the IF condition​

Output specific data depending on the variable value:

[% IF p1.totalcount < 1000;
   query _ " - мало\n";
ELSIF p1.totalcount < 1000;
   query _ " - нормально\n";
ELSE;
   query _ " - много\n";
END %]
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