TL;DR

Romeo’s sub-command teepee can now loop over data automatically.

Remember Romeo? Yes, the hydra-like Perl program that sometimes makes my life easy.

It contains a sub-command teepee, which is meant to capture most of what the standalone program teepee does, so that I can carry one less program with me.

I often end up having input data shaped as an array of hashes, that I have to iterate over. Well, templates being fully Perl-capable, this is pretty easy to do:

[% for my $record (A()) { %]
Hey [%= $record->{some}{nested}{data} %]!
[% } %]

There are a couple of drawbacks with this:

1. using $record is easy in the template part inside the loop, but not straightforward. In particular, what would be a simple expression for getting [% some.nested.data %] becomes a more cumbersome [%= $record->{some}{nested}{data} %]
2. the whole thing seems less readable.

From version 0.030 on, there’s a new command-line option --loop/-l to help with this. When enabled and the input data is an array, it will then loop over each item in the array and render the provided template with the item as data, stitching the results together. Hence, the example template above can be designed to work on a single record:

Hey [% some.nested.data %]!

and Romeo will take care of the looping.

Want to get it right now? Here’s how:

# with curl
curl -LO https://codeberg.org/polettix/Romeo/raw/branch/main/romeo
chmod +x romeo
mv romeo /some/where/in/PATH

# with wget
wget https://codeberg.org/polettix/Romeo/raw/branch/main/romeo
chmod +x romeo
mv romeo /some/where/in/PATH

I hope this can be useful, cheers!