VideLibri / News: Recent posts

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog, like searching or ordering books.

Version 1.885 prepares a new system of managing holdings (different physical copies of the same book that can be ordered and lend separately) and as always adjusts the scraping of different library OPACs that have changed their webpage.... read more

Xidel is a command line tool to download X/HTML pages or access JSON-APIs and extract data from there. It supports XPath 3.0, XQuery 3.0 + JSONiq expressions, compatibility modes for older XPath/XQuery versions as well as CSS 3 selectors and pattern-matching templates.

The 0.9.6 version

• adds function x:request for HTTP or follow-like requests inside a query
• new functions: x:argc, x:argv, x:integer, x:integer-to-base
• fixes that entities were not decoded, if --output-encoding was not set
• improves default encoding settings when converting between Windows terminal encoding and utf8 for piped files
• a new JSON parser with two distinct modes: input formats json/json-strict for accepting/rejecting invalid JSON
• JSON output is prettified.
• An xquery version declaration disables all extension unless a version code like "3.0-xidel" or "3.0-jsoniq" is used. #!xidel in the first line is ignored, so it can be used for executable XQuery scripts.
• has various fixes, performance improvements and internal restructuring... read more

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog, like searching or ordering books.

1.845 updates compatibility some libraries that changed their OPACs and allows editing of the lending history in the desktop version.... read more

Xidel is a command line tool to download X/HTML pages or access JSON-APIs and extract data from there. It supports XPath 3.0, XQuery 3.0 + JSONiq expressions, compatibility modes for older XPath/XQuery versions as well as CSS 3 selectors and pattern-matching templates.

The 0.9.4

• completes the support for XPath/XQuery 3.0.
• uses a new underlying regular expression engine, FLRE, which supports Unicode, \p,\c,\i character classes and is supposed to be extremely fast
• stricter error conditions, invalid XPath queries that were previously evaluated are now rejected, for example
  in regular expressions (?i) or \b, (1 + if(..) then ...) instead of (1 + (if(..) then ...)), gYear("123") instead of gYear("0123")
• this improves the XQuery Test Suite conformance and it passes basically 100% of the XPath 2 tests and over 99.5% of the XQuery 3 tests
• supports the EXPath file module to write or read local files
• custom functions: random($max), random-seed(), x:product($seq)
• new multipage template statements: <try><catch>, <else></else></catch></try>
• the error raising HTTP codes are now customizable
• the headers of the last HTTP request can be accessed via $headers
• improved debugging facilities: Evaluation tracing, colored output, improved error messages
• the default data model for primitive types is now XML Schema 1.1 and Unicode 8.0 conformant
• boolean operations are short-cut evaluated
• --quiet/-q was renamed to --silent/-s
• checks for XIDEL_OPTIONS environment variable
• various fixes and performance improvements ... read more

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog, like searching or ordering books.

1.84 brings complete XPath/XQuery 3 support, i.e. users adding their own custom libraries can now use every arcane XQuery function. It also shows the log(cat) output within the app, and fixes some issues with default libraries that have changed their library webpages.... read more

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog, like searching or ordering books.

1.81 is primarily a bug fix release that fixes support for libraries that have moved to another server or changed their https-certificates.... read more

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog, like searching or ordering books.

1.8 brings two major changes:
+ There is now an import/export function for manual device synchronization or backups.
+ The syntax of the intermediate scripting language that users can use to add their own library and which connects a list of URLs in a library system with a list of patterns matched against those pages was extended. It can now match arbitrary many patterns to a single page, do this matching conditionally, catch exceptions with a try/catch syntax and pass data directly to the next layer of VideLibri, even if that data does not origin from a webpage. Also the patterns used in pattern matching are now called patterns instead templates.... read more

Xidel is a command line tool to download web pages or APIs and extract data from there. It supports XPath 2.0, XQuery 1.0 + JSONiq expressions, parts of XPath/XQuery 3.0 as well as CSS 3 selectors and pattern-matching templates.

The 0.9 release adds support for most of the XPath/XQuery 3.0 syntax like anonymous and higher order functions, supports multipart HTTP requests for file uploads, changes the default output format, adds an (experimental) function for page modifications, fixes a large number of bugs mostly related to command line parsing and XPath/XQuery standard compatibility, and more... ... read more

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog, like searching or ordering books.

A major change of the 1.7 version is that multiple book actions are merged together if possible, e.g. when some books are about to be renewed and the user selects some other books to renew, a single renew request for all items is send to the server.
A few bugs were solved, mostly regarding the supported library systems (e.g. for sisis renewing in a non standard order) and the standard compatibility of the interpreter for the underlying XQuery based scripting language (e.g. values of different types were casted to the wrong common type when used in comparisons).... read more

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog.

After the last, unannounced release (1.666) has added support for the Bibliotheca and Bibliotheca+/OPEN library systems, this release lists some libraries using Bibliotheca. The Android version also has got some grouped sorting options. As usual several compatibility fixes for the listed library were necessary.... read more

VideLibri is a niche-program showing data from certain library websites, and Xidel a general-purpose cli data miner created to assist the development of VideLibri.

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More concretely, VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalog.... read more

VideLibri is a niche-program showing data from certain library websites, and Xidel a general-purpose cli data miner created to assist the development of VideLibri.

---

More concretely, VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically renew all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of a library catalogue.... read more

VideLibri is a daemon-like, platform-independent app that can show and automatically extend all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them. It can also perform all other operations of an library catalogue.
To be maximal flexible, a custom template language was developed, which can be used to add new library systems without doing any actual programming. For the more complex cases, VideLibri also contains a complete, custom XQuery implementation.
Since all currently supported libraries are in Germany the program itself is in German, but we will create a translation, if requested. The template language documentation is already in English.... read more

Xidel is a command line tool to download web pages and extract data from them. It supports XPath 2.0, XQuery 1.0 expressions as well as CSS 3 selectors and pattern-matching templates.

In the 0.6 release the XPath 2.0 interpreter was extended to become a complete XQuery 1.0 engine.
This allowed testing with the entire XQuery Test Suite, and uncovered a few bugs in the XPath 2 part, which where also (mostly) fixed in this release.... read more

VideLibri is a daemon like program that can show and automatically extend all your books lend in certain libraries, so you will never forget to return them.

The release 0.999 adds support for four German libraries in Berlin, and adepts the existing templates of libraries in Düsseldorf to changes on their webpages. (The last supported town is Aachen, btw.)

For each of this libraries the program contains a set of templates, and it supports only these libraries.
However, you can easily write your own templates for new libraries.... read more