Viewing Data Records As Forms: Old Is Gold!

Given a file containing data records made up of multiple fields, you can easily view them using Emacs' forms library.

I use Perl utility get_player to fetch details of BBC Radio programs. When I was using this frequently, I had installed package iplayer.el from Melpa — that package presented the data as a nicely organized Org document. Time passed, and I somehow stopped using it, until … last week. Then I discovered that package iplayer on Melpa hadn't been updated in a few years, and worse had broken because package org no longer includes now obsoleted sub-module orgstruct.

When I realized package iplayer was broken, I tried to make up for its loss for a few days by using shell-level utilities like cut. But then I missed the convenience of being able to work with the data with all of Emacs' power and was initially tempted to write a new package — after all, how hard is it to take a record, split it into fields and display it in a desired form? Fortunately, I remembered another of my favorite edicts from the creator of Perl (Larry Wall)

Lazy Programmer Is A Good Programmer

At the same time I had a strong sense of dejavu — in the early daysa of Emacspeak (approx 1995), I remembered demonstrating the power of Emacs to manipulate and display data records by using file /etc/passwd as an example.

So the completely free (AKA zero-work) solution I used was to leverage Emacs' built-in forms library — the solution as created in get-iplayer.el is below:

(setq forms-read-only t)
(setq forms-file (expand-file-name "~/.get_iplayer/radio.cache"))
(setq forms-number-of-fields 16)
(setq forms-field-sep "|")
(setq forms-format-list
      (list
       "Id: "  1 "\t" "Name: " 3 "\n"
       "Episode: " 4 "\t" "Description: "  12 "\n"))

With the above in place, you can:

1. M-x forms-find-file RET get-iplayer.el
2. This displays one record at a time as specified by forms-format-list.
3. You can search through records etc.