Spud is a domain-specific programming language for creating grocery shopping lists.
One of the big overheads to effective grocery shopping is the time involved in creating a good shopping list. A good shopping list should:
- contain all the ingredients that you need
- contain nothing that you don't need
- be organized
- ingredients should be grouped together by where they appear in a store, or by which store sells them
- be deduplicated
- if two different recipes call for the same ingredient, then there shouldn't be two entries on your shopping list; the two entries should be added together
Creating grocery shopping lists that follow these guidelines takes time. Wouldn't it be so much easier if you just had to decide which recipes to make and then an organized and well-formatted grocery shopping list were produced for you?
With Spud, you can easily store recipes and preferred normalization rules in a personal library. Then, when you need to go shopping, you simply write the names of the recipes you want to make and presto! Spud will output a grocery shopping list that contains what you need to buy. You can even scale the quantities of ingredients, recipes, or entire shopping lists as needed.
The Spud interpreter is hosted through PyPI and can be downloaded using pip.
To install Spud, use:
pip install spudlang
The syntax is designed to closely follow the English language to make it easier for newcomers. For example:
6 kg carrots + chopped
Without any additional information, one would correctly assume that this line of Spud code refers to six kilograms of chopped carrots.
Spud can handle arbitrary units of measure, and allows users to use express numbers in whichever form is most natural.
6 kg carrots
1/3 cup water
9/7 lb potatoes
1 3/4 bunch parsley
3.21 cloves garlic
Note that the fourth line is a mixed fraction, referring to 1.75 bunches of parsley.
Also consider the following, which instructs the Spud interpreter to replace every 100 ml of cooked spinach in the original recipes with 500 ml of uncooked spinach in the final grocery list:
100 ml spinach +cooked -uncooked is 500 ml spinach -cooked +uncooked
Using constructs such as these, it is possible to easily represent a set of ingredients and normalize it into some standard form.
Spud keeps things organized:
apples are a type of fruit
bananas are a type of fruit
1 kg apples is 8.5 count apples
2 apples
0.5 kg apples
3 bananas
1 loaf bread
The first two lines declare that apples and bananas are fruits. The next line is a normalization rule, converting apples by weight into apples by number. These first three lines can be placed in an importable library, so that they do not need to be rewritten for every shopping list.
The output of the above program is:
- groceries
- bread
- 1 loaf
- fruit
- apples
- 6.25 count
- bananas
- 3 count
The two lines calling for apples were converted into the same units and added into a single line item. Apples and bananas were categorized together as fruit.
Spudlang is released using the MIT License.