robbestad / rantjs

Procedurally generate text with JavaScript

Rantjs

Rantjs is a procedural text generator. The goal is to augment human creativity with the boundless potential of randomness. Inspired by Rant.

The project is available via npm (do npm install rantjs).

Demo and more information

Interactive demo available here

Click here for a writeup on my blog

Usage

var rant = require("rantjs");
var sentence=rant('<firstname male> likes to <verb-transitive> <noun.plural> with <pron poss male> pet <noun-animal> on <timenoun dayofweek plural>.');

console.log(sentence); // 'Sean likes to chop parrots with his pet cat on Saturdays.'

For implementation details, please visit the npmjs page

Install

git clone https://github.com/svenanders/rantjs && cd rantjs
npm i
gulp serve

Then open http://localhost:8000

Development Plan

Easy way to choose alternative dictionaries

Indefinite article (a/an) automation

Overwriting (targets)

Capitalisation

Looping (repeaters)

Conditionals

Contributions

Contributions are welcome. Feel free to submit an issue/pull request. The following areas are of particular interest:

Documentation (wiki/code)

Fixing bugs

Optimization

Functions in the development plan

New language features

Testing. Currently, this is the result of the coverage report:

Statements   : 96.44% ( 461/478 )
Branches     : 67.65% ( 46/68 )
Functions    : 100% ( 18/18 )
Lines        : 97.24% ( 458/471 )

Ideally, it should be 100% on everything

New in version 1.0.0

Added option for custom dictionaries. Note that this replaces the built-in dictionary.

var yourCustomDic = {}
...
rant('your text', yourCustomDic);

A sample dictionary file can be found in the ./src folder. Also take a look at the built-in english dicionary in the same folder for reference.

New in version 0.9.x

0.9.7 - Added nonsense verbs from Rantionary

0.9.5 - Added verbs for success and defeat

0.9.4 - Added Death ()

0.9.3 - Added climb (<verb climb up|down>)

New in version 0.9.1

Rewrote Rantjs for CommonJS.

Removed several gulp tasks (concat, minify)

Refactored the tests

Renamed the app internally

New usage syntax (not compatible with 0.8.x)

You can now call Rantjs directly from require:

var sentence=require("rantjs")("<firstname male> likes to <verb-transitive> 
<noun.plural> with <pron poss male> pet <noun-animal> on <timenoun dayofweek plural>.");

Added randomization:

require("rantjs")("A random string: [rep:8][sep:\N]{\C}");
//A random string: XUACJGOGN

New in version 0.8.6

Added support for [rep:x]

Usage:

[case:title][sep:\n][rep:3]{I like <noun animal plural> but not <noun animal plural>}

// I Like Ogres but not Turtles
// I Like Bulls but not Horses
// I Like Poodles but not Owls

Note: [sep:\n] dictates newlines. Alternatively, you can specify \s for space.

New in version 0.8.5

Added support for [case]-tag.

Usage:

[case:upper]<firstname male>

Variants:

[case:none|default|word|upper|lower|case|sentence]

rantjs's Issues

Which files need to be hosted?

Hi @svenanders ,
We are cdnjs team, we want to host this project in cdnjs.
But I'm not sure which files in this repo need to be added, could you please help up find out the main files?
Thank you.

cdnjs/cdnjs#7698

any plans for node?

This project looks great!

Any plans for node support? Using modules (ES6 / CommonJS) would probably clean up your build step quite a lot as well.

Update to support latest version of Rantionary

The dictionary parser is currently not working, so building Rantjs with the latest version of Rantionary won't work. I'm currently working on a fix.

Add git tags

Hi @svenanders ,
We are cdnjs team.
Because we prefer to use dist folder and the name with meaning, we decide to grab files from GitHub instead of npm.
But the git auto-updater in cdnjs relied on git tags so that it can recognize the correct version and automatically update the repo.
Could you please add git tags for the repo? Thank you.

cdnjs/cdnjs#7698
cdnjs/cdnjs#8343

Cannot find module 'en_US'

When I attempt to use any of the repeat syntax ([rep:3]), I receive this error:

Error: Cannot find module 'en_US'
  at Function.Module._resolveFilename (module.js:338:15)
  at Function.Module._load (module.js:280:25)
  at Module.require (module.js:364:17)
  at require (module.js:380:17)
  at braceParser (/Users/brekk/Servers/test/node_modules/rantjs/braceParser.js:43:17)

My example code:

var rant = require('rantjs');
var x = rant('[rep:8]{<adj nsfw>}');

Rantjs not correctly working with node

Please remove window.rant=rant; in line 82 of index.js so we can use it in node again.

Strange output from default pattern

I tried the default pattern on your page and got this:

Two anomalies appear in the output: appearance and undefined. I am assuming that these are unintentional, so I thought I'd let you know.

bower install version / tags please!

this would be awesome for those of us who want to use this on web w/o using something like browserify

Incorrect block behavior

I started playing around with your online demo and wanted to point out a few important block features that I noticed were missing.

Plain text in blocks does not work.

First, I tried creating a block with some normal text in it.

It doesn't appear to print anything. According to the original specification, it should print the same text as if it weren't in the block:

Example text

Repeaters don't work with plain text.

Calling rep followed by a block containing a raw string prints nothing, no matter how many repetitions are specified. It seems to only work with a single query. If rep is not called, a block is ignored.

If a block has no repetitions specified, it should always be assumed that the block will be read one time.

Blocks do not appear to support multiple elements.

Since blocks currently only support lone queries, I decided to test multiple item selection. This doesn't appear to be supported yet, either.

Each repetition should randomly select a noun, adjective, or verb.

---

I understand that Rantjs is still in early development, and perhaps you were already planning to fix these things, but I thought I'd write this up just in case you missed any of them by mistake.

A friend of mine recently rewrote all of the Rant documentation. You can find it here. If your aim is to go with the original language spec, you might find it useful as a reference.

Seed based generation

How difficult would it be to implement seed based generation or using a custom random number generator?