New tag %ft grab a line of text from a file

[Bilgus]

Work in progress
%ft(filename, line)
https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/6143

Get a line of text from a file and display it in the wps

Comments welcome

[iPodVT]

Work in progress
%ft(filename, line)
https://gerrit.rockbox.org/r/c/rockbox/+/6143

Get a line of text from a file and display it in the wps

Comments welcome

It works perfectly for me on both ipod6g and ipodvideo, for everything I tried.  I made a four line text file, and tested it for each line.  I also tried some out of bounds line numbers and they produced an empty string (at least apparently - nothing was displayed from the calls with those bad line numbers).  I also tried with and without a newline/CR for the last line and it worked properly both with and without.  I guessed that the line numbers would be zero-based and that proved to be the case.  I didn't do extensive stress testing, e.g. very long lines of text.  Please let me know of any specific such testing you'd like me to try.

I hope others will find this useful.  Although the 'player name' config setting fulfilled my need/desire to be able to cache a displayable unique name for each individual device, this text file implementation is better because now instead of having to hard code a unique config setting for each player, they can all share the same generic config file and just have their own unique text file of line delimited data, which is much easier to maintain.

Thanks very much for providing this great new feature.

[Dook]

This seems like a really exciting addition to the theme spec, looking forward to trying it out soon. Immediately I'm thinking about the possibility of using a text file as a theme-specific config file that users can edit, possibly helping to eliminate the amount of variants required for themes.

[Bilgus]

Dook, exactly how I hoped y'all would use it!
I have this ready if you can build your own feel free otherwise let me know your devices and I'll get you some builds

[Bilgus]

iPodVT most of the issues I found were around the line_alternator stuff and timeout %t()text1;text2;text3
I think I have that worked out

now if line or file doesn't exist it becomes a #COMMENT as far as the engine is concerned as that makes the logic easier


its pretty well ready unless some bug comes up..

text len is limited to 320 chars sizeof(MAX_PATH)

should handle utf8 as well

Ill be removing the playername setting once we are satisfied with this..

[Bilgus]

Current Manual entries I have:

Tag Description
%ft(filename
[,line]Get a line of text from a file.
224
Use this tag to check for the existence of a file or read a line of text from a file.
Checking if a file exists can be done with %?(ft(filename)<Found|NotFound> similarly
you can also check if a specific line exists with %?(ft(filename, n)<Found|NotFound>
where n is the desired line. Note: empty files or files that do not exist are ignored by
the skin engine otherwise
filename – filename Note: files can only be found in /.rockbox directory or one of its
children. eg. %ft(wps/file.txt) would refer to /.rockbox/wps/file.txt
line – OPTIONAL, which line to grab, defaults to the first line. Note: lines must end
with CR or LF but may not exceed 320 characters

and

13.1.2. Customising The Playername
Some themes (Cabbiev2) show a customizable playername in the Whats Playing Screen.
Edit the first line of /.rockbox/playername.txt to show your own message or leave an
empty file to disable the feature, deleting the file will generate a new playername.txt file
containing ’RockBox!’ next boot.

[Bilgus]

one thing I'm not sure of is if you can use the text from the file as input to other commands but as long as thats the case with other string commands it should be the case here too..

[iPodVT]

filename – filename Note: files can only be found in /.rockbox directory or one of its
children. eg. %ft(wps/file.txt) would refer to /.rockbox/wps/file.txt

FYI - When I tried out the experimental builds I didn't know that there were limitations re where the .txt file can reside.  So I named the file "iPodNames.txt" and put it in the root directory and then used %ft(/iPodNames.txt, 0) and it worked fine.

[iPodVT]

The new tag raises a question:

When someone wants to publish a theme to the general public, I assume they should specify in the description the oldest viable build in which all of theme's tags are functional.  Is there a chronological list somewhere that specifies the build in which each new tag first became available?

[Bilgus]

the theme engine ignores unknown tags not sure if it still tries to display them but the best date ref I can give you is to looka the blame file here
https://github.com/Rockbox/rockbox/blame/master/apps/gui/skin_engine/skin_tokens.c

[Bilgus]

FYI - When I tried out the experimental builds I didn't know that there were limitations re where the .txt file can reside.  So I named the file "iPodNames.txt" and put it in the root directory and then used %ft(/iPodNames.txt, 0) and it worked fine.

there wern't any limitations but then we decided to make it start at the .rockbox folder because thats how the rest of the theme tags do
that and to encourage the files for themes to stay contained

also there will be a file autogenerated by future builds called /.rockbox/playername.txt so you can ref it easily and cabbie in this patch has an example

[iPodVT]

Got it.  Thanks for the explanation.

[Frankenpod]

Sounds useful (esp. for those of us with multiple ipods)

Any possibility the playername could default initially to the device's serial number? (Though I'm not sure if that's accessible to RB, or if non-iPods even have such a thing, so it might not be practical).

[speachy]

When someone wants to publish a theme to the general public, I assume they should specify in the description the oldest viable build in which all of theme's tags are functional.  Is there a chronological list somewhere that specifies the build in which each new tag first became available?

We currently validate themes against "most recent stable release" and "most recent daily build", and those results are shown on the theme info page on the themesite.

Sounds useful (esp. for those of us with multiple ipods)

Any possibility the playername could default initially to the device's serial number? (Though I'm not sure if that's accessible to RB, or if non-iPods even have such a thing, so it might not be practical).

FYI, there's already a freeform 'playername' configuration setting, but that will get removed when this gets merged.   Also I'm not aware of any ipods having a software-queryable serial number, and to be honest the serial number isn't something you'd ever want to display during normal use -- it's ugly.  You'd want a nonoffensive human-friendly string instead.  (Current default is 'Rockbox!' which we think is appropriate)

[iPodVT]

FYI - When I tried out the experimental builds I didn't know that there were limitations re where the .txt file can reside.  So I named the file "iPodNames.txt" and put it in the root directory and then used %ft(/iPodNames.txt, 0) and it worked fine.

there wern't any limitations but then we decided to make it start at the .rockbox folder because thats how the rest of the theme tags do
that and to encourage the files for themes to stay contained

also there will be a file autogenerated by future builds called /.rockbox/playername.txt so you can ref it easily and cabbie in this patch has an example

I'm still thinking about this, and I'm not sure I agree with your placement of the autogenerated playername.txt file.  I think of that file as being in the same user-editable personal data class as track files, playlists, and recordings, and therefore probably shouldn't be in the /.rockbox directory which is hidden by default on both macOS and Windows (IIRC).  Rockbox auto generates the Playlists directory in the device's root directory and %St(playlist catalog directory) looks for that directory wherever that directory has been specified by the user to exist.  For the sake of the naive user, and for the convenience of all users, I suggest that playername.txt be auto placed in the root directory.  In any case, I very strongly hope that %ft be able to access a file in any location that the theme specifies.  The theme can have other .txt files within the /.rockbox directory, but the playername.txt file really ought to be in the root directory (IMHO).