Variable in CDATA in Scala - scala

Is there a way to put a variable to be expanded in a cdata section in scala
val reason = <reason><![CDATA[ {failedReason} ]]></reason>

It could be even simplier:
val reason = <reason>{scala.xml.PCData(failedReason)}</reason>

I am not sure if you can get that through native XML support, but you could do something like:
scala.xml.XML.loadString("<reason><![CDATA[%s]]></reason>".format(failedReason))
You lose some of the compile-time validations that way, but it should give you am xml element with the data which you are looking for. Since it returns a scala.xml.Elem, you can also embed the result in a larger XML structure.
EDIT
After thinking about this a bit more, the following may be a beter (and less fragile) way to do this. It restricts the free-text portion to only the CDATA, minimizing the potential for unbalanced expressions.
<reason>{ scala.xml.Unparsed("<![CDATA[%s]]>".format(failedReason)) }</reason>

Related

Is it Scala style to use a for loop in Scala/Spark?

I have heard that it is a good practice in Scala to eliminate for loops and do things "the Scala way". I even found a Scala style checker at http://www.scalastyle.org. Are for loops a no-no in Scala? In a course at https://www.udemy.com/course/apache-spark-with-scala-hands-on-with-big-data/learn/lecture/5363798#overview I found this example, which makes me thing that for looks are okay to use, but using the Scala format and syntax of course, in a single line and not like the traditional Java for looks in multiple lines of code. See this example I found from that Udemy course:
val shipList = List("Enterprise", "Defiant", "Voyager", "Deep Space Nine")
for (ship <- shipList) {println(ship)}
That for loop prints this result, as expected:
Enterprise Defiant Voyager Deep Space Nine
I was wondering if using for as in the example above is acceptable Scala style code, or it if is a no-no and why. Thank you!
There is no problem in this for loop, but you can use functions form List object for your work in more functional way.
e.g. instead of using
val shipList = List("Enterprise", "Defiant", "Voyager", "Deep Space Nine")
for (ship <- shipList) {println(ship)}
You can use
val shipList = List("Enterprise", "Defiant", "Voyager", "Deep Space Nine")
shipList.foreach(element => println(element) )
or
shipList.foreach(println)
You can use for loops in Scala, there is no problem with that. But the difference is that this for-loop is not an expression and does not return a value, so you need to use a variable in order to return any value. Scala gives preference to work with immutable types.
In your example you print messages in the console, you need to perform a "side effect" to extract the value breaking the referencial transparency, I mean, you depend on the IO operation to extract a value, or you have mutate a variable which is in the scope which maybe is being accessed by another thread or another concurrent task thereby there is no guarantee that the value that you collect wont be what you are expecting. Obviously, all these hypothesis are related to concurrent/parallel programming and there is where Scala and the immutable style help.
To show the elements of a collection you can use a for loop, but if you want to count the total number of chars in Scala you do that using a expression like:
val chars = shipList.foldLeft(0)((a, b) => a + b.length)
To sum up, most of the times the Scala code that you will read uses immutable style of programming although not always because Scala supports the other way of coding too, but it is weird to find something using a classic Java OOP style, mutating object instances and using getters and setters.

In systemverilog how to provide commandline overrides for complex fields like associative array fields

Lets say i have added a associative array string,string field to the factory through the macro `ovm_field_aa_string_string macro. Is there a way to configure it from command line like we do with simple int fields like follows:
./simv ... +ovm_set_config_int=scope,name,value
is there something like
./simv ... +ovm_set_config_aa_string_string=scope,name,key=val,key2=val2
No, you can only set int's and strings from the command line. I strongly discourge the use of any `uvm_field macros because of their inability to deal with complex times, the the poor simulation performance they impose.
This seems to be already answered by someone else
Here is the link to the post
how to get array of values as plusargs in systemverilog?

Scala Anorm - how use it properly

Scala's play framework claims that Anorm, and writing your own SQL is better that ORM's. One of the reasons is that you anyway most often want only transfer data between database and frontend as json. However, most tutorials, and even Play documentation give examples of parsing sql's returned values into case classes, in order to parse it again into json. We still have an object relational mapping anyway, or am I missing a point?
In my database there exists a table with 33 columns. Declaring a case class takes me 33 lines, declaring a parser with ~ operator, takes another 33. Using case statement to create an Object, another 66! Seriously, what am I doing wrong? Is there any shortcut? In django the same thing takes only 33 lines.
If you're using Anorm within a Play application, then the mapping into a Json object of your case class (assuming it has fairly normal apply and unapply functions defined for it, which most do) should be pretty much as simple as defining an implicit which uses the >2.10 macro based Json-inception methods...so all you actually need is a definition like this:
implicit val myCaseFormats = Json.format[MyCaseClass]
where 'MyCaseClass' is the name of your case type. You could even bake this into the parser combinator you use for de-serialising row-sets back from the database...that would dramatically clean up your code and cut down the amount of code you have to write.
See here for details on the Json macros:
https://www.playframework.com/documentation/2.1.1/ScalaJsonInception
I use this quite extensively in a pretty large code-base and it does make things quite clean.
In terms of your parsers for Anorm, remember that you don't have to produce a case-class instance as a result of a parse...you can actually return anything you like, which could just be an indexed sequence of your column values (if you're using something like Shapeless to allow for mixed-type lists etc...) or some other structure.
You do hav macro support in Anorm as well so the the parsers for your case classes can be one liners like this:
import norm.{Macro, Rowset}
val parser = Macro.namedParser[MyCaseClass]
If you want to do something custom, (such as parse direct to JsValue) then you have the flexibility to just hand-craft a more crafty parser.
HTH

Scala: when to use explicit type annotations

I've been reading a lot of other people's Scala code recently, and one of the things that I have difficultly with (coming from Java) is a lack of explicit type annotations.
It's certainly convenient when writing code to be able to leave out type annotations -- however when reading code I often find that explicit type annotations help me to understand at a glance what code is doing more easily.
The Scala style guide (http://docs.scala-lang.org/style/types.html) doesn't seem to provide any definitive guidance on this, stating:
Use type inference where possible, but put clarity first, and favour explicitness in public APIs.
To my mind, this is a bit contradictory. While it's clearly obvious what type this variable is:
val tokens = new HashMap[String, Int]
It's not so obvious what type this one is:
val tokens = readTokens()
So, if I was putting clarity first I would probably annotate all variables where the type is not already declared on the same line.
Do any Scala practitioners have guidance on this? Am I crazy to be considering adding type annotations to my local variables? I'm particularly interested in hearing from folks who spend a lot of time reading scala code (for example, in code reviews), as well as writing it.
It's not so obvious what type this one is:
val tokens = readTokens()
Good names are important: the name is plural, ergo it returns some collection of some kind. The most general collection types in Scala are Traversable and Iterator, and they mostly share a common interface, so it's not really important which one of the two it is. The name also talks about "reading tokens", ergo it obviously should return Tokens in some fashion. And last but not least, the method call has parentheses, which according to the style guide means it has side-effects, so I wouldn't count on being able to traverse the collection more than once.
Ergo, the return type is something like
Traversable[Token]
or
Iterator[Token]
and which of the two it is doesn't really matter because their client interfaces are mostly identical.
Note also that the latter constraint (only traversing the collection once) isn't even captured in the type, even if you were providing an explicit type, you would still have to look at the name and the style!

Scala Parser Combinators: Parsing in a stream

I'm using the native parser combinator library in scala, and I'd like to use it to parse a number of large files. I have my combinators set up, but the file that I'm trying to parse is too large to be read into memory all at once. I'd like to be able to stream from an input file through my parser and read it back to disk so that I don't need to store it all in memory at once.My current system looks something like this:
val f = Source.fromFile("myfile")
parser.parse(parser.document.+, f.reader).get.map{_.writeToFile}
f.close
This reads the whole file in as it parses, which I'd like to avoid.
There is no easy or built-in way to accomplish this using scala's parser combinators, which provide a facility for implementing parsing expression grammars.
Operators such as ||| (longest match) are largely incompatible with a stream parsing model, as they require extensive backtracking capabilities. In order to accomplish what you are trying to do, you would need to re-formulate your grammar such that no backtracking is required, ever. This is generally much harder than it sounds.
As mentioned by others, your best bet would be to look into a preliminary phase where you chunk your input (e.g. by line) so that you can handle a portion of the stream at a time.
One easy way of doing it is to grab an Iterator from the Source object and then walk through the lines like so:
val source = Source.fromFile("myFile")
val lines = source.getLines
for (line <- lines) {
// Do magic with the line-value
}
source.close // Close the file
But you will need to be able to use the lines one by one in your parser of course.
Source: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/scala-user/LPzpXo3sUVE
You might try the StreamReader class that is part of the parsing package.
You would use it something like:
val f = StreamReader( fromFile("myfile","UTF-8").reader() )
parseAll( parser, f )
The longest match as one poster above mentioned combined with regex's using source.subSequence(0, source.length) means even StreamReader doesn't help.
The best kludgy answer I have is use getLines as others have mentioned, and chunk as the accepted answer mentions. My particular input required me to chunk 2 lines at a time. You could build an iterator out of the chunks you build to make it slightly less ugly.