untidy blogsimon steele writes about stuff…

Over in the forums, MurphyMc shows a sample bit of script that will upload your current file to FTP using Python via a PyPN script. It currently hard-codes site/user/pass etc. but these could easily be retrieved from elsewhere (potentially even project properties in the future).

Save To FTP Script

It’s easy to imagine how this could be extended in lots of directions, for example a script could retrieve a file from FTP, store it in a temporary location and then re-upload when the user is finished. That’s FTP integration done, what next!

Obviously I understand that many requests are for a fully-integrated FTP browser/editor, but this example really shows what can be achieved with the scripting integration.

Have you tried playing with PyPN and PN’s scripts system yet? If not, then perhaps you should. A large number of requests on PN’s Feature Requests tracker could be implemented as scripts. Some perhaps not so elegantly as if they were built in, others perfectly.

To start looking at ways that PyPN enhances Programmer’s Notepad, let’s look at a very early feature request: Validate XML.

Here is a simple PyPN script that does just this, adding a command to the scripts window called Validate in the XML group. This can, of course, be mapped to a keyboard shortcut.

The script simply runs the contents of your document through expat. When your Xml is valid no output is printed, where there’s an error the output window will show you the details.

To use this code, just drop it in a file called something like pnxml.py in the scripts directory. You’ll need PyPN installed, along with Python 2.4 and the PyXml package. As of Python 2.5 expat is bundled so the extra package won’t be necessary.

import pn
import scintilla
from pypn.decorators import script
import xml.parsers.expat as expat

@script("Validate", "Xml")
def ValidateXml():
	editor = scintilla.Scintilla(pn.CurrentDoc())
	text = editor.GetText(0, editor.Length)

	parser = expat.ParserCreate()

	try:
		parser.Parse(text, True)
	except expat.ExpatError, ex:
		pn.AddOutput("Error: " + str(ex))

I’m pleased to announce that the current development build on SourceForge of PN 2 is now 2.0.7.610 which contains just minor fixes from .609 to make working with extensions better. PyPN 0.3 adds a number of features over the first two releases and also several bugfixes.

Download PN 2.0.7.610

Download PyPN 0.3

Remember you’ll need Python 2.4 installed to use PyPN.

I finally got some time to clean up and zip up the current pyPN bits and have uploaded them to the web site:

http://www.pnotepad.org/files/pypn-0.1.zip

You will need the latest development build of PN (2.0.7.608 at the time of writing) and Python 2.4 to use this.

What is pyPN?

pyPN is the first extension for Programmer’s Notepad 2, and provides support for scripting PN using Python! You can already do a lot, but there’s also a lot of functionality yet to be exposed.

Other extensions can be provided using the same mechanism pyPN uses, see http://www.pnotepad.org/plugindoc/ for the gory C++ details (not as scary as you might think!).

Version 0.1

This is definitely beta software, so please experiment and report plenty of feedback! Extract the files into your PN folder and restart PN. If you already have a config.xml file you’ll need to merge the two files.

There will be more documentation as time goes on, but the code includes one very simple sample script showing how scripts can be built in to the scripts window. You can turn any python file or buffer into a runnable script by right-clicking and selecting “Use as Script” – this will add the window to the scripts window from where you can double-click to run.

So, some simple examples:

import pn
pn.AddOutput(“Hello!\n”)

This will add text to the output window (you’ll need to show the window first).

To work with scintilla (the text editing component) try something like this:

import pn, scintilla
s = scintilla.Scintilla(pn.CurrentDoc())
s.AppendText(6, “Hello!”)

When you make a mistake in your script at runtime the traceback will be shown in the output window (again, you need to manually show this).

Note that if you put broken scripts in the scripts directory this will currently crash PN on startup – this will  be fixed in future versions.

Finally note that you get some automatic indenting when writing Python code now, the code for this is in the init.py file. You can write indenters for other languages in a similar style. The indenting isn’t perfect, but I love it!

Let me know how you get on, and post anything that works for others to see as either a comment or on the forums!