OmegaScript adds processed text-generation commands to text templates (which will usually be HTML, but can be XML or another textual format). Commands take the form $command{comma,separated,arguments} or $simplecommand, for example:
<html> <head><title>Sample</title></head> <body> <p> You searched for '$html{$query}'. </p> </body> </html>
Where appropriate, arguments themselves can contain OmegaScript commands. Where an argument is treated as a string, the string is precisely the contents of that argument - there is no string delimiter (such as the double-quote character '"' in C and similar languages). This can make complex OmegaScript slightly difficult to read at times.
When a command takes no arguments, the braces must be omitted (i.e. $msize rather than $msize{} - the latter is a command with a single empty argument). If you want to have the value of $msize immediately followed by a letter, digit, or "_", you can use an empty comment (${}) to prevent the parser treating the following character as part of a command name. E.g. _$msize${}_ rather than _$msize_
It is important to realise that all whitespace is significant in OmegaScript - e.g. if you put whitespace around a "," which separates two command arguments then the whitespace will be part of the respective arguments.
Note that (by design) OmegaScript has no unbounded looping constructs. You can loop over entries in a list, but you can't loop until some arbitrary condition is met. This means that it's not possible to accidentally (or deliberately!) write an OmegaScript template which contains an infinite loop.
$$ - literal '$' $( - literal '{' $) - literal '}' $. - literal ','
In the following descriptions, a LIST is a string of tab-separated values.
add filter term TERM as if it had been passed as a B CGI parameter (if TYPE is not-specified, empty or B), or as a negated filter as if passed as an N CGI parameter (if TYPE is N). Invalid types result in an error.
Support for the second parameter was added in Omega 1.4.12 - in older versions only $addfilter{TERM} was supported and added B-style filters.
You must use $addfilter before any command which requires the query to have been parsed - see $setmap for a list of these commands.
encodes DATA using base64.
Added in Omega 1.4.19.
return UTF-8 for the given Unicode codepoint, e.g. $chr{127866} should display as a beer mug if the font has a suitable glyph.
Since ASCII is a subset of Unicode, you can also produce control characters, e.g. $chr{13} gives a carriage return character.
To convert a UTF-8 character to a Unicode codepoint, see $ord.
Added in Omega 1.3.4.
number of other documents collapsed into current hit inside $hitlist, which might be used like so:
$if{$ne{$collapsed,0},at least $collapsed hidden results ($value{$cgi{COLLAPSE}})}
return position of first occurrence of STRING1 in STRING2, if present. Else return an empty string. Examples:
$contains{fish,goldfish} gives "4"
$contains{fish,shark} gives ""
encode STRING for use as a field in a CSV file. By default, escaping is done as described in RFC4180, except that we treat any byte value not otherwise mentioned as being 'TEXTDATA' (so %x00-%x09, %x0B-%x0C, %x0E-%x1F, %x7F-%xFF are also permitted there). Examples:
$csv{Safe in CSV!} gives Safe in CSV!
$csv{Not "safe"} gives "Not ""safe"""
$csv{3$. 2$. 1} gives "3, 2, 1"
Some CSV consumers don't follow the RFC, in which case you may need to encode additional values. For this reason, $csv provides an highly conservative alternative mode in which any double quote characters in the string are doubled, and the result always wrapped in double quotes. To select this mode, pass a second non-empty argument. Examples:
$csv{Quote anyway,1} gives "Quote anyway"
$csv{Not "safe",1} gives "Not ""safe"""
Added in Omega 1.3.4.
returns a list of docids of any documents with document length zero (such documents probably only contain scanned images, rather than machine readable text, or suggest the input filter isn't working well). If TERM is specified, only consider documents matching TERM, otherwise all documents are considered (so Tapplication/pdf reports all PDF files for which no text was found).
If you're using omindex, note that it skips files with zero size, so these won't get reported here as they aren't present in the database.
lookup field NAME in document DOCID. If DOCID is omitted then the field is looked up in the current hit (which only works inside $hitlist).
If multiple instances of field exist the field values are returned as an OmegaScript list (i.e. tab separated), which means you can pass the results to other commands which take a list, such as $foreach, e.g.
$foreach{$field{keywords},<b>$html{$_}</b><br>}
pretty printed filesize (e.g. 1 byte, 100 bytes, 2.1K, 4.0M, 1.3G). If SIZE is negative, expands to nothing. If SIZE is empty, Omega 1.4.x and earlier give 0 bytes but Omega 1.5.0 and later will expand to nothing.
Omega currently ignores anything after the initial part of SIZE which can be parsed as an integer value, but 1.5.0 and later will set $error if SIZE isn't either an integer or empty.
list of all terms in the database with prefix PREFIX, intended to be used to allow drop-down lists and sets of radio buttons to be dynamically generated, e.g.:
Hostname: <SELECT NAME="B"> <OPTION VALUE="" $if{$map{$cgilist{B},$eq{$substr{$_,0,1},H}},,SELECTED}> Any $foreach{$filterterms{H}, <OPTION VALUE="$html{$_}" $if{$find{$cgilist{B},$_},SELECTED}> $html{$substr{$_,1}} </OPTION> } </SELECT>
evaluated argument STUFF for each entry in list LIST. If LIST contains the entries 15, 13, 5, 7, 1 then:
"$foreach{LIST,$chr{$add{$_,64}}}" = "OMEGA"
If you want a list as output instead then see $map.
Added in Omega 1.4.18.
specify an additional HTTP header to be generated by Omega. For example:
$httpheader{Cache-Control,max-age=0$.private}
If Content-Type is not specified by the template, it defaults to text/html. Headers must be specified before any other output from the OmegaScript template - any $httpheader{} commands found later in the template will be silently ignored.
encode STRING as a JSON string (not including the enclosing quotes), e.g. $json{The path is "C:\"} gives The path is \"C:\\\"
Added in Omega 1.3.1.
encodes LIST (a string of tab-separated values) as a JSON array. By default the elements of the array are encoded as JSON strings, but if FORMAT is specified it's evaluated for each element in turn with $_ set to the element value and the result used instead.
The default FORMAT is equivalent to "$json{$_}".
Examples:
$jsonarray{$split{a "b" c:\}} gives ["a","\"b\"","c:\\"]
$jsonarray{$split{2 3 5 7},$mul{$_,$_}} gives [4,9,25,49]
Added in Omega 1.3.1, but buggy until 1.3.4.
Support for the second argument added in Omega 1.4.15.
returns a JSON bool value (i.e. true or false) for OmegaScript value COND.
This is exactly equivalent to $if{COND,true,false} and is provided just to allow more readable JSON-producing templates. This means that COND being empty is false and all non-empty values are true (so note that $jsonbool{0} gives true - if you want a numeric test, you can use $jsonbool{$ne{VALUE,0}}
Added in Omega 1.4.15.
encodes OmegaScript map MAP (as set by $setmap) as a JSON object.
KEYFORMAT provides a way to modify key values. It's evaluated for each key with $_ set to the OmegaScript map key. If omitted or empty then the keys are used as-is (so it effectively defaults to $_). For example $jsonobject{foo,$lower{$_}} forces keys to lower case.
You probably want to avoid creating duplicate keys (RFC 2119 says they SHOULD be unique). Note that the resulting value should be an OmegaScript string - don't pass it though $json{} or wrap it in double quotes.
VALUEFORMAT provides a way to specify how to encode values. It's evaluated for each value with $_ set to the OmegaScript map value and the result should be JSON to use as the JSON object value. If omitted or empty the value is encoded as a JSON string (so effectively the default is "$json{$_}"). Note that (unlike KEYFORMAT) this does need to include $json{} and double quotes, because the value doesn't have to be a JSON string.
Simple example:
$jsonobject{foo}
More complex example which upper-cases the keys and uses JSON integers for the values:
$jsonobject{foo,$upper{$_},$_}
Added in Omega 1.4.15. Since 1.4.19 the returned JSON no longer contains newlines, which makes it usable as a single line serialisation format without post-processing.
returns a list containing the keys of MAP (as set by $setmap). The keys are in sorted order (by raw byte comparison).
Added in Omega 1.4.15.
pretty print list. If LIST contains 1, 2, 3, 4 then:
"$list{LIST,$. }" = "1, 2, 3, 4" "$list{LIST,$. , and }" = "1, 2, 3 and 4" "$list{LIST,List ,$. ,.}" = "List 1, 2, 3, 4." "$list{LIST,List ,$. , and ,.}" = "List 1, 2, 3 and 4."
NB $list returns an empty string for an empty list (so the last two forms aren't redundant as it may at first appear).
append to the log file LOGFILE. LOGFILE will be resolved as a relative path starting from directory log_dir (as specified in omega.conf). LOGFILE may not contain the substring ...
ENTRY is the OmegaScript for the log entry, which is evaluated and a linefeed appended. ENTRY defaults to a format similar to the Common Log Format used by webservers. If an error occurs when trying to open the log file then ENTRY won't be evaluated.
Currently $log doesn't return anything, but in future versions (starting with Omega 1.5.0) it will return an error message if the logfile can't be opened or writing to it fails. If you want to continue to ignore errors, you can future-proof your templates by wrapping $log using $if with no action like so:
$if{$log{example.log}}
Return the tag corresponding to key KEY in the CDB file CDBFILE. If the file doesn't exist, or KEY isn't a key in it, then $lookup expands to nothing. CDB files are compact disk based hashtables. For more information and public domain software which can create CDB files, please visit: http://www.corpit.ru/mjt/tinycdb.html
An example of how this might be used is to map top-level domains to country names. Create a CDB file tld_en which maps "fr" to "France", "de" to "Germany", etc and then you can translate a country code to the English country name like so:
"$or{$lookup{tld_en,$field{tld}},.$field{tld}}"
If a tld isn't in the CDB (e.g. "com"), this will expand to ".com".
You can take this further and prepare a set of CDBs mapping tld codes to names in other languages - tld_fr for French, tld_de for German. Then if you have the ISO language code in $opt{lang} you can replace tld_en with tld_$or{$opt{lang},en} and automatically translate into the currently set language, or English if no language is set.
map a list into the evaluated argument. If LIST contains 1, 2 then:
"$map{LIST,x$_=$_;}" = "x1=1; x2=2;"
Note that $map{} returns a list (since Omega 0.5.0). If the tabs are a problem, then $foreach{LIST,STUFF} does the same thing but just concatenates the results directly rather than adding tabs to make a list.
perform a regex match using Perl-compatible regular expressions. Returns true if a match is found, else it returns an empty string.
The optional OPTIONS argument can contain zero or more of the letters imsx, which have the same meanings as the corresponding Perl regexp modifiers:
return codepoint for first character of UTF-8 string. If the argument is an empty string, then an empty string is returned.
For example, $ord{One more time} gives 79.
To convert a Unicode code point into a UTF-8 string, see $chr.
Added in Omega 1.3.4.
percentage score of current hit (in range 1-100).
You probably don't want to show these percentage scores to end users in new applications - they're not really a percentage of anything meaningful, and research seems to suggest that users don't find numeric scores in search results useful.
list of query strings for prefix PREFIX. Any tab characters in the query strings are converted to spaces before adding them to the list (since an OmegaScript list is a string with tabs in).
If PREFIX is omitted or empty, this is built from CGI P variable(s) plus possible added terms from ADD and X.
If PREFIX is non-empty, this is built from CGI P.PREFIX variables.
Note: In Omega < 1.3.3, $query simply joins together the query strings with spaces rather than returning a list.
set option value which may be looked up using $opt. You can use options as variables (for example, to store values you want to reuse without recomputing). There are also several which Omega looks at and which you can set or use:
decimal - the decimal separator ("." by default - localised query templates may want to set this to ",").
thousand - the thousands separator ("," by default - localised query templates may want to set this to ".", " ", or "").
stemmer - which stemming language to use ("english" by default, other values are as understood by Xapian::Stem, so "none" means no stemming).
stem_strategy - tell the query parser how to apply the stemmer - can be one of:
Unknown values are ignored. Added in Omega 1.4.8.
stem_all - if "true", then tell the query parser to stem all words, even capitalised ones. Now deprecated in favour of setting stem_strategy to all, and ignored if stem_strategy is also set.
spelling - if "true", then the query parser spelling correction feature is enabled and $suggestion can be used. Deprecated - use flag_spelling_correction instead (which was added in version 1.2.5).
fieldnames - if set to a non-empty value then the document data is parsed with each line being the value of a field, and the names are taken from entries in the list in fieldnames. So $set{fieldnames,$split{title sample url}} will take the first line as the "title" field, the second as the "sample" field and the third as the "url" field. Any lines without a corresponding field name will be ignored. If unset or empty then the document data is parsed as one field per line in the format NAME=VALUE (where NAME is assumed not to contain '=').
weighting - set the weighting scheme to use, and (optionally) the parameters to use if the weighting scheme supports them. The syntax is a string consisting of the scheme name followed by any parameters, all separated by whitespace. Any parameters not specified will use their default values.
E.g. $set{weighting,bool} or $set{weighting,bm25 1 0.8}
Valid scheme names are bb2 (in Omega >= 1.3.2), bm25, bm25+ (in Omega >= 1.4.26), bool, coord (in Omega >= 1.4.1), dlh (in Omega >= 1.3.2), dph (in Omega >= 1.3.2), ifb2 (in Omega >= 1.3.2), ineb2 (in Omega >= 1.3.2), inl2 (in Omega >= 1.3.2), pl2 (in Omega >= 1.3.2), pl2+ (in Omega >= 1.4.26), tfidf (in Omega >= 1.3.1), and trad.
The deprecated scheme name lm is also recognised (in Omega >= 1.3.2), but this selects Xapian::LMWeight which is incorrectly implemented and so we do not recommend using it.
expansion - set the query expansion scheme to use, and (optionally) the parameters to use if the expansion scheme supports them. The syntax is the scheme name followed by any parameters, all separated by whitespace. Any parameters not specified will use their default values. Valid expansion schemes names are prob (preferred alias for trad, added in Omega 1.4.26), bo1 and trad. E.g. $set{expansion,trad 2.0}. If not specified, the default scheme used is equivalent to $set{expansion,trad 1.0}.
weightingpurefilter - normally a query consisting only of filter terms won't have relevance weights calculated. This option allows you to specify a weighting scheme to use for such queries, with the same values supported as for weighting above. For example, $set{weightingpurefilter,coord} will weight such queries by how many filter terms match each document.
Omega 1.2.5 and later support the following options, which can be set to a non-empty value to enable the corresponding QueryParser flag. Omega sets flag_default to true by default - you can set it to an empty value to turn it off ($set{flag_default,}):
Note that the Xapian::QueryParser::FLAG_ACCUMULATE flag is always enabled by Omega because it's needed for $stoplist and $unstem to work correctly, and is deliberately not included in the above list.
Omega 1.2.7 added support for parsing different query fields with different prefixes and you can specify different QueryParser flags for each prefix - for example, for the XFOO prefix use XFOO:flag_pure_not, etc. The unprefixed constants provide a default value for these. If a flag is set in the default, the prefix specific flag can unset it if it is set to the empty value (e.g. $set{flag_pure_not,1}$set{XFOO:flag_pure_not,}).
You can use :flag_partial, etc to set or unset a flag just for unprefixed fields.
Similarly, XFOO:stemmer specifies the stemmer to use for field XFOO, with stemmer providing a default.
set error message for the current execution, which can also be looked up using $error.
Using $seterror error early in template prevents running the query.
For example, $seterror can be used when the user enters a wrong parameter in the search.
set a map of option values which may be looked up against using $opt{MAP,NAME} (maps with the same name are merged rather than the old map being completely replaced).
You can create and use of maps in your own templates, but Omega also has several standard maps used to control building the query:
Omega uses the "prefix" map to set the prefixes understood by the query parser. So if you wish to translate a prefix of "author:" to A and "title:" to "S" you would use:
$setmap{prefix,author,A,title,S}
In Omega 1.3.0 and later, you can map a prefix in the query string to more than one term prefix by specifying an OmegaScript list, for example to search unprefixed and S prefix by default use this (this also shows how you can map from an empty query string prefix, and also that you can map to an empty term prefix - these don't require Omega 1.3.0, but become much more useful in combination with this new feature):
$setmap{prefix,,$split{ S}}
Similarly, if you want to be able to restrict a search with a boolean filter from the text query (e.g. "group:" to "G") you would use:
$setmap{boolprefix,group,G}
Don't be tempted to add whitespace around the commas, unless you want it to be included in the names and values!
Another map (added in Omega 1.3.4) allows specifying any boolean prefixes which are non-exclusive, i.e. multiple filters of that type should be combined with OP_AND rather than OP_OR. For example, if you have have a boolean filter on "material" using the XM prefix, and the items being searched are made of multiple materials, you likely want multiple material filters to restrict to items matching all the materials (the default it to restrict to any of the materials). To specify this use $setmap{nonexclusiveprefix,XM,true} (any non-empty value can be used in place of true) - this feature affect both filters from B CGI parameters (e.g. B=XMglass&B=XMwood and those from parsing the query (e.g. material:glass material:wood if $setmap{boolprefix,material,XM} is also in effect).
Note: you must set the prefix-related maps before the query is parsed. This is done as late as possible - the following commands require the query to be parsed: $prettyterm, $query, $querydescription, $queryterms, $relevant, $relevants, $setrelevant, $unstem, and also these commands require the match to be run which requires the query to be parsed: $freqs, $hitlist, $last, $lastpage, $msize, $msizeexact, $terms, $thispage, $time, $topdoc, $topterms.
returns the elements from LIST at the positions listed in the second list POSITIONS. The first item is at position 0. Any positions which are out of range will be ignored.
For example, if LIST contains a, b, c, d then:
"$slice{LIST,2}" = "c" "$slice{LIST,1 3}" = "b d" "$slice{LIST,$range{1,3}}" = "b c d" "$slice{LIST,$range{-10,10}}" = "a b c d"
sort the entries in a list. The sort order is an ascending string sort by byte value by default. OPTIONS is zero or more of the following characters which control the sort operation:
Options # and n aren't valid together.
Decodes STRING with Xapian::sortable_unserialise() and returns the resulting floating point value. For example, this provides a way to decode values stored using the scriptindex valuenumeric action.
Added in Xapian 1.4.22.
$split{STRING}
returns a list by splitting the string STRING into elements at each occurrence of the substring SPLIT. If SPLIT isn't specified, it defaults to a single space. If SPLIT is empty, STRING is split into individual bytes.
For example:
"$split{one two three}" = "one two three"
return the name from a DB parameter for the sub-database containing DOCID.
If DOCID is omitted it defaults to the current document in the hitlist.
Prior to Xapian 1.4.12 the implementation assumed that each omega database name corresponded to a single Xapian database and if a database name referred to a stub database file expanding to multiple Xapian databases then this command would misbehave. In 1.4.12 and later this case is taken into account.
return the docid in $subdb{DOCID} corresponding to DOCID in the combined database.
If DOCID is omitted it defaults to the current document in the hitlist.
Prior to Xapian 1.4.12 the implementation assumed that each omega database name corresponded to a single Xapian database and if a database name referred to a stub database file expanding to multiple Xapian databases then this command would misbehave. In 1.4.12 and later this case is taken into account.
returns the substring of STRING which starts at byte position START (the start of the string being 0) and is LENGTH bytes long (or to the end of STRING if STRING is less than START``+``LENGTH bytes long). If LENGTH is omitted, the substring from START to the end of STRING is returned.
If START is negative, it counts back from the end of STRING (so $substr{hello,-1} is o).
If LENGTH is negative, it instead specifies the number of bytes to omit from the end of STRING (so "$substr{example,2,-2}" is "amp"). Note that this means that "$substr{STRING,0,N}$substr{STRING,N}" is "STRING" whether N is positive, negative or zero.
transform string using Perl-compatible regular expressions. This command is sort of like the Perl code:
my $string = STRING; $string =~ s/REGEXP/SUBST/; print $string;
In SUBST, \1 to \9 are substituted by the 1st to 9th bracket grouping (or are empty if there is no such bracket grouping). \\ is a literal backslash.
The optional OPTIONS argument is supported by Omega 1.3.4 and later. It can contain zero or more of the letters gimsx, which have the same meanings as the corresponding Perl regexp modifiers:
- g - replace all occurrences of the pattern in the string
- i - make the pattern matching case-insensitive
- m - make ^/$ match after/before embedded newlines
- s - allows . in the pattern to match a linefeed
- x - allow whitespace and #-comments in the pattern
truncate STRING to LEN bytes, but try to break after a word (unless that would mean truncating to much less than LEN). If we have to split a word, then IND is appended (if specified). If we have to truncate (but don't split a word) then IND2 is appended (if specified). For example:
$truncate{$field{text},500,..., ...}
converts a 4 byte big-endian binary string to a number, for example:
$date{$unpack{$value{0}}}
returns a lower bound on values in slot SLOT (empty values don't count towards this bound). The bound is not necessarily tight - i.e. it may be lower than the lowest value which actually occurs.
Added in Omega 1.4.22.
returns an upper bound on values in slot SLOT. The bound is not necessarily tight - i.e. it may be higher than the highest value which actually occurs.
Added in Omega 1.4.22.
OmegaScript numeric operators are forgiving in their interpretation of numeric arguments. Any characters after an initial span of ASCII digits are ignored, so 123abc is interpreted the same as 123 and values with no leading digits are interpreted as zero, including an empty string.
A reason for this behaviour is that it gives more robust handling for numeric values which are specified in CGI parameters - for example, if an Omega URL is quoted in a text document or email, punctuation after it may get included in the URL when it's turned into a link or cut and pasted.
OmegaScript logical operators treat an empty string as a false logical value and any non-empty string as true.
These return a value suitable for use in $if, $and, $or, etc.
evaluates COND1, COND2, ... in turn until a non-empty value is obtained, and then evaluates and returns the corresponding THEN. If all COND values expand to empty values, then evaluates and returns ELSE (if present, otherwise returns nothing).
$cond provides a neater way of writing a cascading series of $if checks. If there's only one condition, $cond is equivalent to $if.
Added in Omega 1.4.6.
if COND is non-empty, evaluates and returns THEN; otherwise evaluates and returns ELSE. If THEN and/or ELSE are omitted then returns nothing. You can use $if{COND} to evaluate COND but discard the result of that evaluation, which can be useful if COND has side-effects.
The ability to omit THEN was added in Omega 1.4.15.
include another OmegaScript file FILE. If opening FILE fails, then FALLBACK is evaluated and returned.
Support for the FALLBACK argument was added in Omega 1.4.18.
first evaluates EXPR, and then evaluates CASE1, CASE2, ... in turn until one of them has the same value as EXPR did, and then evaluates and returns the corresponding VALUE. If none of the CASE values matches, then evaluates and returns DEFAULT (if present, otherwise returns nothing).
Added in Omega 1.4.6.