Feature Addition: repurpose choice=Question?-answers in different lists

[Gewerd-Strauss]

Hello,

I don't have the know-how to do so myself, so I can't do a pull request for this. Instead, I am opening an Issue. I am sorry.

lintalist can do a lot, and it is awesome in many ways, some of which I haven't had the need to explore yet. But there is one feature that, to my knowledge, doesn't exist - or I don't know how to make it work properly.

Take the following template:

[[Choice=!|Email Person one|email Person two|email person three]]
Hello [[Choice=!|Person 1| Person 2|Person3]]    
...
Sincerely,
me
...

Right now, I have to choose the same surname twice to first choose the name I want to address, then choose the corresponding email address.

Is there a way to merge these two into one question, perhaps by creating two arrays from those choices, then index into the second array with the chosen index of the first one? In that way, you could have an indirect mapping even though the key to that array would be a different one. I don't know how lintalist works under the hood sadly, so I can't really point to where this would be implemented. I hope I got the idea across well enough.

Thank you,

Sincerely,

~Gw

[lintalist]

I think you can try this: use Split and Choice, whereby you use a special character (here $) to split the selected choice into two parts so you can use one element of it via [[sp=1]] - I'm using a "named" split here but if you only have one you can omit the "_email" bit from it as well.

[[Split_Email=[[Choice=!|John$john@domain1|Betty$bwhite@domain2|email person three$mailaddres@domain]]|$]]
Hello [[SP_Email=1]]
...
Sincerely,
me
...

Email address: [[SP_Email=2]]

You could do something similar with [[var]] or [[snippet]] where you define local variables. Say you have a local variable John so if your Choice is John you can use [[var=John]] to use a "related bit of information" so to speak. Might be tedious to maintain of course if you have many, the split is probably relatively easy - if it is something that needs to be edited often, you can store that info in a text file and just read that info via [[file=]] as in [[Split_Email=[[Choice=!|[[file=data.txt]]]]|$]]

[Gewerd-Strauss]

Hello,

thank you, this does work wonders.
However, I have indeed recently come to the point where I suddenly have to assume several edits per month, which makes this tedious to keep up by hand. How would such a file need to be structured (containing names and addresses) in order to be processed correctly by lintalist?
I have most names combined in an excel file so far, so using that excel file would be best.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
~Gw

[lintalist]

AutoHotkey can read Excel files directly but as you can edit CSV directly in Excel too that might be easiest.
(If you must work with Excel directly look for excel examples posted by Fanatic Guru on the AutoHotkey forum and you'll figure it out, doesn't look to complicated but never tried it myself)

So this is your CSV file:

"John, Jr",john@domain1
Betty,bwhite@domain2
email person three,mailaddres@domain

We need to pre-process it to make it suitable for [[Choice]], so add this to plugings\MyFunctions.ahk and restart Lintalist[1]

; add this to plugings\MyFunctions.ahk and restart
CSVData(file,char="$")
    {
     global ParseEscapedArray
     FileRead, data, %file%
     Loop, parse, data, `n, `r
        {
         line:=A_LoopField
         Loop, parse, line, CSV
          {
           insert:=A_LoopField
           insert:=StrReplace(insert,"[",ParseEscapedArray[1]) ; escape [ <SB
           insert:=StrReplace(insert,"]",ParseEscapedArray[2]) ; escape ] >SB
           insert:=StrReplace(insert,"|",ParseEscapedArray[3]) ; escape | ^SB
           output .= insert char
          }
         output .= "|"
        }
     Return Trim(output,"|")
    }

Update the snippet to this (change file name/path to data.csv of course, it assumes it is in the lintalist folder):

[[Split_Email=[[Choice=!|[[CSVData("data.csv")]]]]|$]]
Hello [[SP_Email=1]]
...
Sincerely,
me
...

Email address: [[SP_Email=2]]

If you use A_Tab in function and \t in the snippet instead of the $ the choice might look a bit better.

[1] See https://lintalist.github.io/#Functions

Edit: more robust csvdata()