tbls/doc/Tutorial.md

Tutorial

Random Selections

At its most basic, tbls selects a random element from a table.

Suppose you have a few tables:

:: suit
Hearts
Bells
Whistles
Cups
Knives
Shovels

:: card
Ace
One
Two
[...]
Queen
King
Beast

tbls might return "Whistles" from suit. Or "Two" from card.

Expansion

But wait there's more. tbls will also expand certain text found in a table entry.

Let's add another table:

:: draw
[card] of [suit]

When you place the name of a table in [squarebrackets], then tbls views that as a placeholder for a random item from that table. It will expand that text. So 'draw' might end up being "Thief of Shovels" or "Twelve or Cups".

Filters

tbls can run arbitary filters on text after expanding it. Example filters can be found in lib/filters.fnl.

To apply filters, dot-chain them at the end of a table reference.

Consider the following tables:

:: origin
Evelyn eats one [fruit.c]
Evelyn eats many [fruit.c.s]

:: fruit
banana
apple
pear

s, plural, and pluralize are all different ways to call the 'plural' filter function. c is 'capitalize.'

Example output:

Evelyn eats one Pear
Evelyn eats many Bananas