Express-Lines

Perform code evaluation on selections

What is Express-Lines?

Express-Lines is a utility that will run expression (in various languages) from your selections and replace the output from the evaluated expression.

What can be use with Express-Lines?

Run a number sequence
Text padding
Advanced text replacement
and more... (examples below)

How it works?

Simply install the extension, restart and you are good to go!

Select some selections,

For default evaluation (in JavaScript), press Ctrl+Alt+E (Windows/Linux) or Ctrl+Cmd+E (macOS)
For custom evaluation (using custom evaluator), press Ctrl+Alt+C (Windows/Linux) or Ctrl+Cmd+C (macOS)

then enter some expression or just press Enter/Return, your selections should be evaluated and replaced right away!

Expression Syntax

An expression is simply a text that will pass to the eval function (in JavaScript) or as a one-liner code (for custom evaluator). This expression system is really powerful as it can manipulate the text before passing on to the evaluator.

Each expression will be run for each selection and will be evaluated separately.

These are the macros that will provide the information about the selections and also for the manipulation...

\<
Returns a < character (aka. to escaped a < character)
<index>
Returns a selection index number
<lineno>
Returns an active line number (a line that cursor is on)
<line>
Returns a whole text on an active line
<sel> or <selection>
Returns a selection text (can be multi-line)
<len:<sub-expression>> or <length:<sub-expression>>
Returns a length of a sub-expression output
<lower:<sub-expression>>
Returns a lower-cased output from a sub-expression
<upper:<sub-expression>>
Returns an upper-cased output from a sub-expression
<trim:<sub-expression>>
Returns a whitespace-trimmed output from a sub-expression
<trims:<sub-expression>>
Returns a joined, whitespace-trimmed output from each line of a sub-expression
<join:<value>:<sub-expression>>
Returns a joined output from each line of a sub-expression using value as a separator
<escaped:<sub-expression>>
Returns an escaped output from a sub-expression using escapeCharacters on the evaluator

Examples

Text:

    Alex is riding a bear to the village
while Bob is playing a kite. Meanwhile,
Carl is preparing food for them.

Selections:

Alex on line 1
Bob on line 2
Carl on line 3

Expression: <sel>
Output:

Alex from 1st selection
Bob from 2nd selection
Carl from 3rd selection

Expression: <line>
Output:

Alex is riding a bear to the village from 1st selection
while Bob is playing a kite. Meanwhile, from 2nd selection
Carl is preparing food for them. from 3rd selection

Expression: <upper:<sel>>[<lineno>]
Output:

ALEX[1] from 1st selection
BOB[2] from 2nd selection
CARL[3] from 3rd selection

Expression: <escaped:"<len:<sel>>">
Output:

\"4\" from 1st selection
\"3\" from 2nd selection
\"4\" from 3rd selection

Expression: Line <lineno> contains <length:<trim:<line>>> characters
Output:

Line 1 contains 36 characters from 1st selection
Line 2 contains 39 characters from 2nd selection
Line 3 contains 32 characters from 3rd selection

Example Usages

Run a number sequence

Let's say we want to add each table row and new class named row-1, row-2 and row-3 accordingly
First we prepare for the naming part
Then we run a default evaluator (in this example, JavaScript) with the following expression <index>+1
Here is our class name after evaluated the expression
How about add more rows?
Now we want to name it evenly so we use (<index>+1)*2
Nice! What about the odd one? Seems strange...
Say no more! Just select it again
Then we will use them as our input for the expression <sel>*2-1
Now it's done!

Text padding

Here we want to pad our variable names to align to the right
First, we select it
This time we will use Python 3 to help us for the alignment
Since the longest word is 14 characters long, we will use print("%14s" % ("<sel>"), end="")
Done!

Advanced text replacement

Let's say we want to change all of these image paths to be relative to the images/ path
As always, select it first
We will use Python 3 again
Now we utilise os.path for the path manipulation with import os.path; print("\""+os.path.relpath(<sel>, "images/")+"\"", end="")
Now our image paths has been changed correcly. Yay!