slowtable 2.6.2

slowtable

Set of tools to manage timetables, including a parser to read timetables for FAST NUCES Lahore.

Features

1. Simple UNIX philosophy following tools
2. Simple serialized format, human readable
3. Regex based filtering
4. Advanced filtering tool
5. Colored output (per section)

Prerequisites

1. Libreoffice - convert xlsx to ods, since stparse only accepts ods
2. A D compiler (ldc), 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 -c=app
./link.sh

This will create a multi-call binary slowtable in the bin folder.

The ./link.sh script will create symlinks in ~/.local/bin/ for following tools:

Tools

Run any of these tools with the --help flag to show help.

stparse

Reads a FAST NUCES Lahore's timetable file (timetable must be first sheet), and outputs a serialized list of Classes, tab separated values, with a tab at start:

TimetableName
	courseName	courseSection	venue	day	timeISOString	durationMinutes
	...
over

for example:

Fall2023.ods[0]
	...
	operations research	BSE-5C	E&M-2	mon	143000	80
	operations research	BSE-5B	CE-1	mon	113000	80
	operations research	BSE-5A	CS-1	mon	100000	80
	operations research	BSE-5C	E&M-2	wed	143000	80
	operations research	BSE-5A	CS-1	wed	100000	80
	operations research	BSE-5B	CS-5	fri	113000	80
	...
over

stdelab

Renames labs to courses. Useful when output of stparse is going to stcomb, pass it through stdelab so stcomb sees labs as same as course, generating same sections for both.

Example:

stparse tt.ods 0 10 | stdelab > tt

stfilter

Reads list of classes, and runs them through a set of filters, outputting objects in same structure, which pass the filter.

Filtering

The filter 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:

stparse input.ods | stfilter -s BSE-4

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

stfilter -s BSE-4A BCS-4A

-ns section

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

stfilter -ns 'M\S\S-'

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:

stfilter -c 'Object Oriented Programming'

-nc course

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

stfilter -s BSE-4 -nc 'Data Structures'

-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):

stfilter -s BSE-4A -cs 'Database (BSE-4B)'

-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):

stfilter -s BSE-4 -ncs 'Software Design (BSE-4B)'

sthtml

Takes input (stdin) timetable(s), and outputs HTML for each.

Example:

cat BSE-5 | sthtml > BSE-5.html

stcomb

Takes input timetables, and outputs all possible non-clashing combinations, sorted from best to worst.

It takes one optional argument: maximum number of combinations to generate.

Example:

cat BSE-5 | stcomb | sthtml > BSE-5-all.html

Usage

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

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

Then use stparse to extract timetable information from it:

stparse timetable.ods > timetable

From there onwards, slowtable tools can be used with the timetable data:

cat timetable | stfilter -s BSE-5 > bse5-timetable
cat bse5-timetable | sthtml > bse5-timetable.html
cat bse5-timetable | stcomb | sthtml > bse5-timetables-all.html

The generated HTML files can be opened by a web browser.

Acknowledgments

This program uses TransientResponse's dlang-ods library.