Saturday, April 14, 2018¶

Today I mostly worked on eidreader and its integration into Lino. A historic moment: It is now possible to read Belgian eID cards into Lino Avanti or Lino Welfare without a Java. Including the picture. Disclaimer: it works with my eID card, I didn’t test it on other cards until now. TODO: write documentation so that interested developers can watch it in action.

Five releases in one day¶

The eidreader had 5 releases today.

Marc Rabaey reported a problem with eidreader 0.0.1 (it was not possible to install it):

$ pip install eidreader
Collecting eidreader
  Downloading eidreader-0.0.1.tar.gz
    Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info:
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-install-2hj2tlzx/eidreader/setup.py", line 3, in <module>
        exec(compile(open(fn, "rb").read(), fn, 'exec'))
    FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'setup_info.py'

    ----------------------------------------
Command "python setup.py egg_info" failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip-install-2hj2tlzx/eidreader/

It took me a few version numbers to fix the issue (because it’s difficult to test these issues without actually releasing). Now (version 0.0.4) it should work.

The problem was that my setup_info.py trick doesn’t work for single-file projects, it works only when there is a package. I read this document but could not find any better solution.

I continued my work on getting the whole system to run. One gotcha was that the data in requests.post(url, data=data) must not be a nested dict (i.e. a dict containing other dicts). Actually they explain it well: More complicated POST requests.

Another challenge was that the Java version obviously had some powerful date parser which understands strings like "01.JUN. 1968". This is how my birth date is stored on my Belgian ID card). My favorite package python-dateutil which claims to provide Generic parsing of dates in almost any string format fails when parsing that string:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse as date_parser
>>> date_parser("01.JUN. 1968", ignoretz=True)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: Unknown string format

The stumblestone is the missing space after the day. If we add it manually, it works:

>>> date_parser("01. JUN. 1968")
datetime.datetime(1968, 6, 1, 0, 0)

But that’s of course just a hint for improving the parser, not a solution for our problem.

I tried with ignoretz and fuzzy, but none helped:

>>> date_parser("01.JUN. 1968", ignoretz=True)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: Unknown string format

>>> date_parser("01.JUN. 1968", fuzzy=True)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: Unknown string format

Then I tried the dateparser package which turned out to be more successful:

>>> import dateparser
>>> dateparser.parse("01.JUN. 1968")
datetime.datetime(1968, 6, 1, 0, 0)

I ended up extending the lino.utils.IncompleteDate.parse() method.

And then I pushed a big bunch of changes I had been doing during the last week. Thy break the test suites, but I was impatient to publish them. Here is (rather: should be) a summary of these changes.

Subtle changes in Atelier:

atelier/__init__.py no longer executes setup_info.py file
Fixed a failure when inv prep was invoked from a subdir of the project’s root.