4. Extending combine

If combine was built with Guile (GNU’s Ubiquitous Intelligent Language for Extensibility), you can do anything you want (within reason) to extend combine. This would have been set up when combine was compiled and installed on your computer. In a number of places, there are built-in opportunities to call Guile with the data that is currently in process. Using these options, you can use your favorite modules or write your own functions in scheme to manipulate the data and to adjust how combine operates on it.

The most common method (in my current usage) of extending combine is to alter the values of fields from the input files before they are used for matching or for output. This is done inside the field list by adding the scheme statement after the range and precision. This is covered in the section on field specifications. See section Field-specific extensions, for details.

Another useful option is the ability to initialize Guile with your own program. To do this, you can use the ‘--extension-init-file’ (or ‘-X’) followed by a file name. combine will load that scheme file into Guile before any processing. In that way your functions will be available when you need them in the running of the program. It certainly beats writing something complicated on the command line.

In addition, there are Guile modules included in the distribution, which can be used in extension scripts.

This document was generated by Daniel P. Valentine on July 28, 2013 using texi2html 1.82.