Tracery for Python

This is a (rough) port of Kate Compton's wonderful Tracery to Python. The port is by Allison Parrish.

I'm always writing little one-off recursive template/grammar expansion functions in my Python generative text projects. And I love working with Tracery! So I figured: why not save myself (and potentially others) some time and just make it possible to use Tracery from within Python? This port is the result!

The port is a fairly literal Python translation of this version of tracery.js in the official repository's tracery2 branch.

Installation

pip install -e git+https://github.com/aparrish/pytracery.git#egg=tracery

(I'm working on getting this package on PyPI.)

Usage

See Kate Compton's Tracery tutorial for information about how Tracery works. In the Python port, you use Python dictionaries instead of JavaScript objects for the rules, but the concept is the same otherwise.

import tracery
from tracery.modifiers import base_english

rules = {
    'origin': '#hello.capitalize#, #location#!',
    'hello': ['hello', 'greetings', 'howdy', 'hey'],
    'location': ['world', 'solar system', 'galaxy', 'universe']
}

grammar = tracery.Grammar(rules)
grammar.add_modifiers(base_english)
print grammar.flatten("#origin#") # prints, e.g., "Hello, world!"

Any valid Tracery grammar should work in this port. The base_english modifiers in tracery.modifiers are a port of the modifiers in the JavaScript package. Many aspects of Tracery are not standardized, so in some edge cases you may get output that doesn't exactly conform to what you would get if you used the same grammar with the JavaScript version. (e.g., "None" in strings where in JavaScript you might see "undefined")

Contributing

This port is very fresh but I wanted to put it on GitHub so it would be easier to deploy my own bots that use the code. A lot remains to be done: see todo.txt for a (probably incomplete) to-do list. Feel free to submit pull requests or to open issues in the GitHub issue tracker.

List of contributors:

• Hugo van Kemenade (build process, code clean-up)

License

This port inherits Tracery's original Apache License 2.0.

Copyright 2016 Allison Parrish
Based on code by Kate Compton

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.