slowtable 1.0.0

slowtable

Tool to clean up timetable sent by FAST NUCES.

Features

1. Regex based filtering
2. Filtering based on course(s) and/or section(s)
3. Negating courses, sections, and course-section combo
4. Colored output (per section)

Prerequisites

1. Libreoffice (headless) or google sheets - to convert xlsx to ods
2. A D compiler, and dub - both can be downloaded from here
3. git - to clone repo, or you can download the code from github

Building

Run the following to clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/Nafees10/slowtable
cd slowtable
dub build -b=release

This will create a binary named slowtable.

Usage

First to convert an xlsx timetable file to ods, run the following:

libreoffice --headless --convert-to ods path/to/timetable.xlsx

Or alternatively, you can upload the xlsx file to google sheets, and Download in OpenDocument format (ods).

From there onwards, slowtable can be run:

./slowtable path/to/converted/timetable.ods [commands] > output.html

Running the above will generate a HTML file containing exact same contents as original timetable. Use filters (read below) to filter out irrelevant courses and sections. The generated HTML file can be opened by a web browser.

JSON output

Alternatively, the filtered or interpreted data can be printed as JSON values, for example, to be used in another program etc. This is done using the -f json option. For example:

./slowtable input.ods -cs 'database (SE-4A)' -f json > classes.json

Will produce the following content in classes.json file:

{
	"classes": [
		{
			"day": "mon",
			"duration": 170,
			"name": "database systems lab",
			"section": "BSE-4A",
			"time": "08:30:00",
			"venue": "Lab(CS-4)"
		},
		{
			"day": "tue",
			"duration": 80,
			"name": "database systems",
			"section": "BSE-4A",
			"time": "11:30:00",
			"venue": "E&M-2"
		},
		{
			"day": "thu",
			"duration": 80,
			"name": "database systems",
			"section": "BSE-4A",
			"time": "11:30:00",
			"venue": "E&M-2"
		}
	]
}

Filtering

The parser ignores any non-alphanumeric characters in courses names, to make filtering easier, and it also lowercases all course names. But section names are kept as it is. For example, the course Software Design & Architecture will be read as software design architecture.

All filters are regular expressions.

When no -s, -c, or -cs filters are provided, the -c filter is defaulted to be .* so it includes all courses of all sections. So any negating filters can be used without the -s, -c, or -cs filters.

-s section

Use the -s flag to filter for sections. For example, to only include courses for all sections of BSE-4, run the following:

./slowtable input.ods -s BSE-4 > table.html

To only include courses for BSE-4A and BCS-4A, run the following:

./slowtable input.ods -s BSE-4A BCS-4A > table.html

-ns section

Use the -ns flag to filter out a section. For example, to exclude all Masters courses, while keeping all BS courses:

./slowtable input.ods -ns 'M\S\S-' > table.html

this uses the regex filter M\S\S to match any section that begins with M followed by 2 alphabets followed by a -.

-c course

Use the -c flag to filter for courses, i.e: include all sections of a specific course. For example, to include all sections of Object Oriented Programming, run the following:

./slowtable input.ods -c 'Object Oriented Programming' > table.html

-nc course

Use the -nc flag to filter out a course. For example, to include all courses of BSE-4, except for Data Structures:

./slowtable input.ods -s BSE-4 -nc 'Data Structures' > table.html

-cs course (section)

Use the -cs flag to include a specific course of a specific section. For example, to include all BSE-4A courses, along with Database Systems (BSE-4B):

./slowtable input.ods -s BSE-4A -cs 'Database (BSE-4B)' > table.html

-ncs course (section)

Use the -cs flag to exclude a specific course of a specific section. For example, to include all BSE-4 courses, except for Software Design .. (BSE-4B):

./slowtable input.ods -s BSE-4 -ncs 'Software Design (BSE-4B)' > table.html

Acknowledgments

This program uses a modified version of TransientResponse's dlang-ods library.