juretta.com

URI-Template gem released

URITemplate is a parser for URI Templates as defined in the URI Template specification (http://bitworking.org/projects/URI-Templates).

URI Templates are strings that contain embedded variables that are transformed into URIs after embedded variables are substituted. This specification defines the structure and syntax of URI Templates.

A simple example shows the usage: http://example.com/search?q={searchTerms}&num={count} can be expanded to

http://example.com/search?q=hello%20world&num=5
http://example.com/search?q=ruby&num=100

by supplying different variables for searchTerms and count.

http://bitworking.org/projects/URI-Templates/ is the homepage of the current draft. http://code.google.com/p/uri-templates/ hosts the current reference implementation in Python.

Install the Ruby gem:

macbook-pro:~ stefan$ sudo gem install uri-templates

After playing around with Ragel and ANTLR I decided to use the excellent Treetop (Parsing expression grammar implementation) to implement the URI template specification. Although the draft explicitly states that you do not need a full full-fledged parser, Treetop made it really easy to implement just that.

Get the source:

macbook-pro:~ stefan$ git clone git://scm.juretta.com/uri-templates.git