[uf-discuss] hKit parsing library for PHP5

Mon Jun 19 15:10:54 PDT 2006

On returning from @media and lots of associated interesting hallway 
conversions, I sat down to hack on a microformat-related idea. It 
quickly became apparent that what should've been a couple of hours 
coding was going to take significantly longer because I had no 
toolkits to back me up. So I put my idea on hold, and thought I'd 
better get hacking on a parsing toolkit instead.
I poked around looking at stuff that's already out there, including 
Microformats Base, but I couldn't find anything that fitted the model 
I was after - namely chuck in a string or URL, and get out an array 
structure of, say, hCards.
So in the principal of release early, release often, here's what I'm 
calling hKit for PHP5 version 0.1.
http://allinthehead.com/code/hkit/hkit-v0.1.tgz
It depends on SimpleXML in PHP5, and really needs either the PHP Tidy 
functions or tidy on the local system (a configurable setting), 
otherwise you're depending on the page being valid. It uses a 
pluggable system of 'profiles' for each supported µF - the only one 
of which is hCard at the moment. The GetByURL() method supports URL 
fragment drilldown.
This really is way too early to be releasing, but if I don't now I 
probably never will. This really is a first pass, and bits of it are 
a bit hacky. Known limitations (ha!) are:
* Doesn't fully enforce all the parsing rules in hcard-parsing
* Doesn't support include pattern
* Doesn't resolve paths to absolute URLs on, say, images
* No architecure to post-process values yet - e.g. email begins with 
mailto:
All of which makes me ask, well what does it do? :) In practise, 
point it at any random hCard-enabled page and it returns a pretty 
good set of results. May even be useable for basic applications at 
this point. Knock up a quick profile and it'll probably handle 
vevents too.
Most important of all, I'm licensing it under a LGPL license with the 
hope that others might like to contribute at some point along the 
way. If we have a reasonable set of open tools out there, it really 
lowers the point of entry for others to hack together quick 
applications - as X2V has already proved.
So any quick testing or feedback would be very much appreciated.
drew.