Mr. Lance E Sloan sloanlance

jq: JSONL → TSV conversion

What is TSV?

TSV means "tab-separated values". I prefer this format over CSV ("comma-separated values") because it doesn't require as much quoting. Many programs that can use CSV formatted data can also use TSV, although they may need to be explicitly told of the different format if it's not detected automatically.

However, in any of the jq scripts below, "@tsv" can usually be replaced with "@csv" to get CSV output instead.

jq: JSONL ↔︎ JSON conversion

Prerequisites

jq — https://jqlang.org/ — "like sed for JSON data"

There are several options available for installing jq. I prefer to use Homebrew: brew install jq
JSONL → JSON

After you made some cool games or apps with Pythonista, you may want to make it run as a standaone app on iPad/iPhone and possibly share it on the AppStore. This how-to tells you how to do it.

What you need:

Pythonista code you wrote
A Mac with Xcode 7.1 installed
iPhone/iPad running iOS 9

Steps:

Download PythonistaProjectTemplate.zip. The original PythonistaProjectTemplate described at http://olemoritz.net/pythonista-15-whats-new-and-whats-missing.html does not work with Xcode 7. I updated it to work with Xcode 7 and added a more interesting example than the plain old Hello World thing.
Unzip the file and open the project in Xcode 7.1. In project settings, change the Bundle Identifier from com.yuhangwang.pythonistaproject to something else.

Coping with a Touch Bar on a MacBook Pro

Install Karabiner-Elements: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/
In Karabiner-Elements' preferences
1. Disable the Touch Bar's esc key
  1. Simple Modifications
    1. Target Device: "No product name (No manufacturer name)", is the Touch Bar
      - From key: escape
      - To key: vk_none (disable this key)
2. Make `~ act as esc and fn + `~ act as `~

	// "Pseudorandom", because it's not guaranteed to be truly random.
	// Express a floating point random number as base 26 and remove "0." from the beginning.
	// Next, to make it alphabetical, replace digits 0-9 with letters q-z.
	// @returns {string} Usually 10 to 13 characters in length
	Math.random().toString(26).substring(2).replace(/[0-9]/g, function (c) {return 'qrstuvwxyz'[c]});

	// Alternate, non-function versions (which is more efficient?)
	Math.random().toString(26).substring(2).split('').map(c => 'qrstuvwxyz'[c] \|\| c).join(''); // split to array, replace, join to string
	Math.random().toString(26).substring(2).replace(/[0-9]/g, c => 'qrstuvwxyz'[c]); // examine only characters 0-9
	Math.random().toString(26).substring(2).replace(/./g, c => 'qrstuvwxyz'[c] \|\| c); // examine all characters

	/**
	* Problem: `DateTime::getTimestamp` returns _`int`_! Calculations such as the following
	* are incorrect if the `DateTime` object includes fractions of seconds:
	*
	* ```php
	* $durationSeconds = strval($endTime->getTimestamp() - $startTimestamp);
	* ```
	*
	* `DateTime::diff` can subtract properly, but only under PHP 7.1. (Curiously,
	* `DateTime::getTimestamp` still returns `int` under PHP 7.1!)