Decomp

Decomp, short for decompose, is a Clojure tool for translating HTML into the equivalent Hiccup AST. It was developed for refactoring raw or static html easily into the Ring web development stack.

The Hiccup formatting language allows the description of HTML syntax trees in a Lisp-like prefix notation based on Clojure's Vector literal denoted []. In Hiccup one may say [:a {:class "bar" :href "/"} "go home!" ], which renders to the equivalent html <a class="bar" href="/">go home!</a>. As you can see this is a fairly regular translation and the Hiccup tool makes it easy to go from Clojure to HTML. Decomp decomposes the expanded html into the Huccup-equivalent vector stack, completing the round trip.

Usage

> (use 'me.arrdem.decomp.core)

;; process-string wraps the application of the lexer, parser and pprinter in one easy function
> (pprint (process-string
            "<foo a=\"b\"> this
               <!-- ignored -->
               <a href=\"/bar\">
                 goes home
               </a>
               as does
               <a href=\"/\">
                 this!
               </a>
             </foo>"))
[[:foo
    {:a "b"}
        "this"
    [:a {:href "/bar"} "goes home"]
    "as does"
    [:a {:href "/"} "this!"]]]
nil

;; Decomp supports arbitrary properties and tags...
> (process-string "<baz bung=\"1\" blarrrrrrrrgh=\"2\"> </baz>")
[[:baz {:blarrrrrrrrgh "2", :bung "1"}]]

Decomp can also be used as a standalone tool able to translate files or standard input from html to hiccup. The standalone jar can be invoked as $ java -jar decomp.jar foo.html just as one would expect. Multiple file arguments are supported, and in the absence of file arguments decomp will attempt to read & process HTML from standard input.

Limitations

Top-level comments for instance will break the parser
Unbalanced open and close tokens will also kill the parser
Parser does not do error checking to ensure that matched open and closes have equivalent values
Javascript (due to semicolons and {}) will likely break the parser or at least behave strangely
Inline CSS should work but is iffy

Get Decomp

Leiningen:

[me.arrdem.decomp "0.1.1"]

Standalone:

Standalone Jar

License

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.