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Overview and documentation

A-Parser uses the Template Toolkit engine for formatting queries and results. This template engine allows you to form the final string (e.g., queries or results) based on rules defined in a template. Template Toolkit offers a wide range of features:

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

Template engine usage example​

Official Template Toolkit documentation​

A major advantage of this template engine is the availability of comprehensive documentation in Russian and English; below are links to the most important sections of the documentation:

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

Usage examples​

Examples of frequently used templates

Math plugin usage example​

Randomly select a specified number of links:

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

FOREACH loop example​

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

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

WHILE loop example​

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

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

Condition example​

Output specific data depending on a variable's value:

[% IF p1.totalcount < 1000;
   query _ " - few\n";
ELSIF p1.totalcount < 1000;
   query _ " - normal\n";
ELSE;
   query _ " - many\n";
END %]