polysquare-generic-file-linter 0.1.24
Polysquare Style Guide Linter
License: MIT
Keywords: development linters

Polysquare Generic File Linter
==============================

Status
------

\| Travis CI (Ubuntu) \| AppVeyor (Windows) \| Coverage \| PyPI \|
Licence \|
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\|`|Travis| <http://travis-ci.org/polysquare/polysquare-generic-file-linter>`_\|`|AppVeyor| <https://ci.appveyor.com/project/smspillaz/polysquare-generic-file-linter>`_\|`|Coveralls| <http://coveralls.io/polysquare/polysquare-generic-file-linter>`_\|`|PyPIVersion| <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/polysquare-generic-file-linter>`_`|PyPIPythons| <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/polysquare-generic-file-linter>`_\|`|License| <http://github.com/polysquare/polysquare-generic-file-linter>`_\|

Checks each file passed in for compliance with polysquare style
guidelines.

-  ``headerblock/filename``: Checks that the first line of the file has
   a line which matches ``/path/to/file`` from the source root
-  ``headerblock/desc_space``: Checks that the second line of the
   headerblock is as empty comment
-  ``headerblock/space_copyright``: Checks that the second last line of
   the headerblock is an empty comment
-  ``headerblock/copyright``: Checks that the last line of the
   headerblock contains an appropriate short-form copyright notice
-  ``file/newline_last_char``: Checks that the last line is just a
-  ``file/spelling_error``: Checks that docstrings and comments do not
   contain spelling errors or technical-like terms that do not appear in
   the rest of the source file
-  ``file/trailing_whitespace``: Checks that no line contains trailing
   whitespace

Main Linter Usage
-----------------

::

    usage: polysquare-generic-file-linter [-h] [--checks]
                                          [--whitelist [LIST [LIST ...]]]
                                          [--blacklist [LIST [LIST ...]]]
                                          [--fix-what-you-can]
                                          [--spellcheck-cache SPELLCHECK_CACHE]
                                          [--log-technical-terms-to LOG]
                                          [--stamp-file-path STAMP_FILE_PATH]
                                          [--block-regexps [BLOCK [BLOCK ...]]]
                                          [FILE [FILE ...]]

    Lint for Polysquare style guide

    positional arguments:
      FILE                  read FILE

    optional arguments:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      --checks              list available checks
      --whitelist [WHITELIST [WHITELIST ...]]
                            list of checks that should only be run
      --blacklist [BLACKLIST [BLACKLIST ...]]
                            list of checks that should never be run
      --fix-what-you-can    fix errors automatically
      --spellcheck-cache SPELLCHECK_CACHE
                            path to spell-checking cache file
      --log-technical-terms-to LOG_TECHNICAL_TERMS_TO
                            path to file to log technical terms to
      --stamp-file-path STAMP_FILE_PATH
                            path to directory to store cached results
      --block-regexps [BLOCK_REGEXES [BLOCK_REGEXES ...]]
                            Regular expressions to exclude from all checks.

Spell-checking
--------------

Of some interest to others may be the spell-checking functionality. The
``file/spelling_error`` check will scan any inline documentation
(docstrings and comments) in your code for spelling errors and misused
technical terms. If you want a string, (because, for example, it
contains user-facing text) to be considered, just make it a python-style
docstring by using three quotes.

Ordinary words
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The spell-checker will check any ordinary word, those being words with
roman alphabetical characters and an apostrophe (') against a list of
words in the American English dictionary as generated by
`SCOWL <http://app.aspell.net/create>`_ at level 50 with abbreviations
and hacker-terms on. You can also specify your own domain specific words
by providing a file called ``DICTIONARY`` in the project root directory.
Words are checked against both lists on a case-insensitive basis.

Technical words
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Certain words, once separated by the check, will be treated as
"technical" words as opposed to ordinary words. They will be checked
against the list of valid symbols detected from the surrounding source
code. For instance, the following code will trigger an error, because
the term \_CustomTerm wasn't defined in the source file (CustomTerm was,
however):

::

    class CustomTerm:

        """_CustomTerm is a certain type of class."""

Ignoring certain expressions
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Sometimes it does not make sense to run spellcheck or check certain
expressions against the list of detected technical words. This is often
the case where comments might contain inline markup or metadata which
looks and behaves like code. The check can be told to ignore anything
matching a user-specified regex in order to handle this case. Just pass
the regex to ``--block-regexps``.

Removal of punctuation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The check will do its best to remove surrounding punctuation around
words such that only those words are checked against the word lists.
However, punctuation must follow standard English grammar rules in order
for words around them to be considered as ordinary words instead of
technical words. For instance, a space must appear before an opening
parenthesis. But a nested opening parenthesis can appear directly after
another opening The golden rule is that if it looks like something which
could be code, the surrounding words will be treated as code and not as
ordinary English words.

Speeding up execution
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

`Whoosh <https://bitbucket.org/mchaput/whoosh/src>`_, the spellchecking
engine behind ``file/spelling_error`` needs to generate some data
structures in order to quickly find corrections for words. Generating
these data structures with the long word list that is shipped with this
tool by default can take a few seconds. Obviously, this would be
undesirable if this tool is to be used multiple times or as part of a
script. You can pass ``--spellcheck-cache`` and a path to a directory to
store cache files to cache the result of these data structures between
invocations.

Stand-alone spellchecking
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you just want to run spellcheck on the code comments and inline
documentation, then you can use the ``--whitelist`` option to only run
that check. Just pass it with ``--whitelist file/spelling_error``.

If you want to run spellcheck on an entire file, a special tool called
``spellcheck-linter`` is provided which also serves that purpose. It
will check all ordinary looking words against the user-provided
``DICTIONARY`` and the built-in American English dictionary. If
``--technical-terms`` and a path to a filename containing technical
terms is provided, it will also check that technical looking terms exist
in this file.

Spellcheck Linter Usage
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

::

    usage: spellcheck-linter [-h] [--spellcheck-cache SPELLCHECK_CACHE]
                             [--technical-terms TECHNICAL_TERMS]
                             [--technical-terms-dependencies [[DEPENDENCY ...]]]
                             [--stamp-file-path STAMP_FILE_PATH]
                             [FILE [FILE ...]]

    Find spelling errors

    positional arguments:
      FILE                  read FILE

    optional arguments:
      -h, --help            show this help message and exit
      --spellcheck-cache SPELLCHECK_CACHE
                            path to spell-checking cache file
      --technical-terms TECHNICAL_TERMS
                            path to file to source technical terms from
      --stamp-file-path STAMP_FILE_PATH
                            path to directory to store cached results

Technical terms
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

A technical terms file is just a list of symbols in a text file. As a
matter of convenience, this can be automatically generated for you by
passing ``--log-technical-terms-to`` to
``polysquare-generic-file-linter`` when checking the inline
documentation of those files. The second argument after this switch
should be the path to a filename where technical terms are to be stored.
On each invocation, the union of the current file contents and the
technical terms detected will be written back to the file.

Disabling regions from being spell-checked
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If you need to disable a region from being spell-checked, you can wrap
it in triple-back-ticks, like so:

::

        content that is not spell-checked

Embedding the checking API
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The exported API in ``polysquarelinter.spelling`` isn't by any means
stable right now, but it can be embedded into an application with some
ease.

The ``Dictionary`` class encapsulates the Whoosh spellchecking API,
word-lookup and caching functionality. The ``dictionary_sources``
keyword argument indicates a list of files from which the words in
passed to the Dictionary were sourced from. If any of these files has a
newer timestamp than the dictionary cache, then the dictionary cache
will be regenerated.

The ``spellcheck_region`` function takes a list of lines and runs
spellcheck and a check for invalid technical words on each word in those
lines. It will handle punctuation and other syntactical markets
appropriately in either case. Both the ``valid_words_dictionary`` and
``technical_words_dictionary`` can be either None or an instance of
``Dictionary``. The ``user_words`` argument is simply a set of words
that the user has indicated are always valid.

The ``spellcheckable_and_shadow_contents`` splits a file into
spellcheckable chunks (made out of ``_ChunkInfo``) and "shadow
contents", which make up the rest of the file. The shadow contents are
usually just the code around the inline documentation. The ``data``
member of ``_ChunkInfo`` is a list of lines, effectively representing
the region which should be spellchecked. ``line_offset`` and
``col_offset`` indicate the line and column offset into the main
contents. If you are reporting errors, any error in ``SpellcheckError``
as returned by ``spellcheck_region`` will be returned relative to the
contents passed to it and not to the whole file. Use the offsets in
``_ChunkInfo`` to turn these into absolute offsets into the file being
checked itself.

Caching
~~~~~~~

Internally, ``polysquare-generic-file-linter`` and ``spellcheck-linter``
cache their results using the
```jobstamps`` <https://github.com/polysquare/jobstamps>`_ library. If
you want to redirect where the cache files are written, you can pass
``--stamp-file-path`` to either tool.

.. |Travis| image:: https://img.shields.io/travis/polysquare/polysquare-generic-file-linter.svg
.. |AppVeyor| image:: https://img.shields.io/appveyor/ci/smspillaz/polysquare-generic-file-linter.svg
.. |Coveralls| image:: https://img.shields.io/coveralls/polysquare/polysquare-generic-file-linter.svg
.. |PyPIVersion| image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/v/polysquare-generic-file-linter.svg
.. |PyPIPythons| image:: https://img.shields.io/pypi/pyversions/polysquare-generic-file-linter.svg
.. |License| image:: https://img.shields.io/github/license/polysquare/polysquare-generic-file-linter.svg