parse keywords??

Comments

• darryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins

  October 15, 2007 edited October 15, 2007

  Heya -- I'm just encountering this with my script to convert comments -> keywords.
  
  So far I've found that:
  
  - Apparently certain photo tagging tools (Photoshop, etc.) use semi-colons
  - SmugMug doesn't have a very elegant way of dealing with this
  - Double-quotes are your friend
  
  Here's the test case:
  keywords (typed directly into SmugMug):
  phrase one; onetag twotag "phrase two" some other words
  
  Here's the keywords that SmugMug ends up getting:
  - onetag twotag some other words
  - phrase one
  - phrase two
  
  Whoa, wacky, huh?
  
  phrase one, sure that makes sense. Delimiters are ; and the ^ (beginning of string). phrase two, right -- double-quotes.
  
  But WTF? double-quotes designate beginning and end of a keyword, but don't act as delimiters? That's stupid.
  
  I get it, I get it. Your docs say, "space-delimited keywords":
  http://www.smugmug.com/help/keywords-tags
  
  And then all of these pros came along with their fancy tagging programs and screwed you up with their semi-colons. So uh, ok, semi-colons are delimiters too.
  
  But engh. If you have a mixed case like me, with tags coming from both IPTC and end-users, you're kind of screwed.
  
  Worst case though (with the above) is that I should've gotten:
  - phrase one
  - onetag twotag
  - phrase two
  - some other words
  
  I mean, then I could at least see what SmugMug was doing. But concatenating keywords on either side of a double-quoted string? That's nutty.
  
  Ok, I guess my solution will be: double-quote everything, and hope for the best.

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• darryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins

  October 15, 2007 edited October 15, 2007

  One other reason to use double-quotes and eschew semi-colons:
  Keywords under 4 letters and numeric keywords are invalid unless double-quoted.

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• devbobo Registered Users, Retired Mod Posts: 4,339 SmugMug Employee

  October 15, 2007 edited October 15, 2007

  darryl wrote:

  - Apparently certain photo tagging tools (Photoshop, etc.) use semi-colons
  - SmugMug doesn't have a very elegant way of dealing with this
  - Double-quotes are your friend

  
  using a semi-colon as a delimiter for keywords works fine with SmugMug, including via the api.

  David Parry
  SmugMug API Developer
  My Photos

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• darryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins

  October 15, 2007 edited October 15, 2007

  My head hurts
  I just replicated SmugMug's ridiculous keyword parser in Perl. So now I determine keywords the same way SmugMug does. My method for testing was: enter keywords, click Save, see how SmugMug splits it up. Run script to grab same keywords from API, bang head against wall until my script parses it the same as SM.
  
  Ugh, my original code was embarassingly bad (not that anybody was looking). Here's my rewritten function:
  

  #!/usr/bin/perl
  
  use HTML::Entities ;
  
  sub parsekeys {
         my $oldkeywords = '' ;
         my @allkeywords = @quotedkeywords = @splitkeywords = () ;
  
         $oldkeywords = shift ;
  
  # Decode the HTML entities
          $oldkeywords = decode_entities($oldkeywords) ;
  
  # Let's pluck out the quoted strings ;
  
          while ($oldkeywords =~ m/"(.+?)"/) {
                  push (@quotedkeywords,$1) ;
                  $oldkeywords =~ s/".+?"// ;
          }
  
          $oldkeywords =~ s/^\s*// ;
          $oldkeywords =~ s/\s*$// ;
          $oldkeywords =~ s/\s\s+/ /g ;
          $oldkeywords =~ s/;\s+/;/g ;
  
          if ($oldkeywords =~ /;/) {
                  @splitkeywords = split (/;/, $oldkeywords) ;
          } else {
                  @splitkeywords = split (/\s/, $oldkeywords) ;
          }
  
          @allkeywords = (@quotedkeywords, @splitkeywords) ;
  
          sort @allkeywords ;
          return @allkeywords ;
  }
  
  1;
  

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• darryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins

  October 15, 2007 edited October 15, 2007

  I had to come up with the code above because I really do (ok, I really *might*) end up with keywords like this:
  
  "foo" phrase one; onetag twotag "phrase two" wtftag "other words" crash & burn
  
  Which SmugMug parses into this (| is my delimiter):
  
  foo|phrase one|phrase two|other words|onetag twotag wtftag crash burn

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• scottV Registered Users Posts: 354 Major grins

  October 18, 2007 edited October 18, 2007

  ack, interesting stuff...im not looking forward to tackling this portion in my app. Seems to me like the api should return the list of keywords already parsed and using one common delimiter. They must have the keywords stored individually already to create the keyword cloud on the homepage and for searching. instead of returning whatever junk the user typed in we should get back the SM interpreted list. make sense?

  http://scottvickers.smugmug.com

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• darryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins

  October 18, 2007 edited October 18, 2007

  f00sion wrote:

  ack, interesting stuff...im not looking forward to tackling this portion in my app. Seems to me like the api should return the list of keywords already parsed and using one common delimiter. They must have the keywords stored individually already to create the keyword cloud on the homepage and for searching. instead of returning whatever junk the user typed in we should get back the SM interpreted list. make sense?

  
  Yeah, I'd love that. It's also a pain in the ass because if they ever do add an option to allow guests (password-authenticated for the site or gallery) to add/edit keywords, there's a high possibility that people will screw it up when they see semi-colons, commas, and double-quotes all being treated differently.
  
  Oh yeah, I need to fix this because apparently they now accept commas as delimiters. Crap.

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• darryl Registered Users Posts: 997 Major grins

  October 18, 2007 edited October 18, 2007

  devbobo wrote:

  using a semi-colon as a delimiter for keywords works fine with SmugMug, including via the api.

  
  Well, I guess my problem is that I want to allow multiple people to tag photos, a la flickr, but if they're all sharing the same text-entry field, there's a lot of potential for screw-ups if there are different delimiters used. And a lot of these users are probably not that technically saavy.
  
  Flickr allows for:
  - adding tags one at a time.
  - deleting tags one at a time.
  - immediate parsing and display of how tag was parsed.
  
  This seems like a good model. Also, there is *often* a delay and lag in (I guess) the SmugMug AJAX posts that go from the Keyword UI to the database. I recently tried testing different delimiter combinations, and three separate "save keyword" attempts ended up getting concatenated together. Which is good I suppose that nothing got lost, except that there wasn't any visual feedback of this until the third or fourth attempt.

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