HQL

A SQL inspired query language for HTML documents.

Goals

I have two goals for this project:

Learn/practice Python I am just now learning Python and wanted a project to do with it. I figured this might be a good one since it has the opportunity for data analysis.
Create a new language for fun I thought it'd be an interesting experiment to create a new language.

These two things being the main reasonings, I'm expecting some big diffs, big re-writes, and probably a few start overs. We'll see how this goes.

Installation

I honestly do not know how you are supposed to install this package... Supposedly the below will do it, but I'm not so sure...

If you don't use pipsi, you're missing out. Here are installation instructions.

Simply run:

$ pipsi install .

Usage

Starting up

$ hql https://www.python.org

Start up the app by running hql. You also may add an optional URL to connect and request an html file in one go.

Operations

There are several commands you can run once inside the HQL environment.

exit - to exit the environment
help - to see the help menu (it looks a lot like this list)
refresh - to re-query the currently set url
response - to see the HTML response
url - to retrieve and set the current url

URL Command

The url command can be use two ways. Just typing it alone will print the currently set url:

url

It also takes an optional second argument that can be used to set the url.

url https://pypi.python.org/pypi

Querying

Querying is currently set up to mimic SQL queries, but please know that it is no where near as feature-filled at the moment. The four query sections accepted are (in order):

SELECT: (required) followed by the properties and attributes that you'd like to select from the returned html
WHERE: followed by the selection criteria for the query.
LIMIT: max number of responses
OFFSET: how many responses to skip in the beginning

Select

You can select any number of values, but currently you cannot send a * to get them all (yet).

SELECT name class id

Where

Currently, the where clause only accepts one equality match.

SELECT name WHERE class = btn

Limit and Offset

Both accept one number. They can be used in conjunction or separately.

SELECT name LIMIT 10 OFFSET 5

Selections

Currently you can query and select these properties of the HTML element

attributes (like class, id, href, etc. except name for now)
children
name (the tag name like div)
parent
text

sfrieson / hql

HQL