Introduction
Strings
In Common Lisp strings are vectors of characters.
They are written as characters surrounded by double quotes (e.g "Hello World!").
The stringp predicate will return true only if the given value is a string.
Strings can be split into sub-strings with the subseq function which takes the string a start index and optionally an end index.
The indexing is zero-based.
(subseq "Hello World" 1 5) ; => "ello"
(subseq "skip to the end" 5) ; => "to the end"
Strings can be compared for equality with string=.
If case of the characters should be ignored then string-equal can be used.
(string= "macaroni" "macaroni") ; => T
(string= "macaroni" "MACARONI") ; => NIL
(string-equal "macaroni" "MACARONI") ; => T
Operations like upper-casing, lower-casing and capitalization of strings can be done with string-upcase string-downcase and string-capitalize.
(string-upcase "not too loud") ; => "NOT TOO LOUD"
(string-downcase "YELL IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS") ; => "yell it from the rooftops"
(string-capitalize "practical COMMON LiSP") ; => "Practical Common Lisp"
Instructions
In this exercise you will write some code to help Larry the Lisp Alien parse and format log strings. These log strings come in from various systems and need to be processed so that their messages can be display on an informative monitoring display.
Log strings are in the form "[<level>]: <message>". Level will be one of the following values: info, warn, or ohno.
Define a function log-message which will take a log string and evaluate to the message it contains.
(log-message "[ohno]: whoops!") ; => "whoops!"
2. Determine the severity
The level of the log string determines its severity.
- a level of
info means a severity of :everything-ok
- a level of
warn means a severity of :getting-worried
- a level of
ohno means a severity of :run-for-cover
Define a function log-severity which will take a log string and evaluate to the correct severity.
(log-severity "[warn]: might want to get that checked") ; => :getting-worried
3. Dealing with the vagaries of reality
Unfortunately sometimes the log strings are not always formatted correctly. Specifically the log level may be not all lower case as specified above. Modify log-severity to handle this.
(log-severity "[WaRn]: string case system failing") ; => :getting-worried
Depending upon the severity the message should be modified in different ways:
- a severity of
:everything-ok should have its message changed to all lower-case.
- a severity of
:getting-worried should have its message changed to have each word capitalized.
- a severity of
:run-for-cover should have its message changed to be all upper-case.
Define a function log-format that takes a log message and evaluates to a properly formatted message.
(log-format "[ohno]: whoops!") ; => WHOOPS!
Learning Exercise
