rolero/paprika.net

Flavour text and natural language generator

Paprika.Net

What is Paprika?

Paprika is a language, and software, for generating semi-random arrangements of words - like computer-driven mad-libs. This can be useful for generating game dialogue, tweet bots, and flavour text which have spice and variety! Paprika (the software) takes a "request" and uses it to execute some "grammar" (grammars are the files which make up your random options). Better to show than to tell:

# Here's a grammar file. Hashes denote comments (lines the software should not read)
# Below is a "category", denoted with an asterisk:
* animal
cow
horse
mouse

* nice
lovely
delightful
amazing

If this grammar was loaded, the user could enter the following input to get the following example output:

Check out this [animal]
-> "Check out this cow"

My [animal] is [nice]
-> "My mouse is delightful"

If you run each command again, the output can be different, because the bits in [square brackets] are randomised.

The language has many more features than this, which you can explore at http://paprika.me.uk

In this repository

Paprika.Net is the core functionality of the Paprika engine. It can load, parse, execute, and validate grammars and queries. It is well unit-tested in Paprika.NetTests. This project is available as a NuGet package as SteGriff.Paprika.Net.

Paprika.Net.Console is basically a desktop client for Paprika. It's a command line app which calls upon Paprika.Net, letting you play with and iterate your grammar files rapidly.

Using the Paprika.Net package (API)

WIP

Install the NuGet package using Install-Package SteGriff.Paprika.Net

• Instantiate a Core object using var engine = new SteGriff.Paprika.Net.Core();
• Load a grammar with engine...
• Parse a request with engine.Parse("My query is [cool/nice]")
• You can select specific values you want to use (instead of random ones) using an overload of engine.Parse...

Config for Paprika.Net.Console app

By default, the grammars are chosen from the paprika-grammar submodule (../../paprika-grammar/) but you can override this in App.config like so:

<appSettings>
	<add key="GrammarRoot" value="C:/path/to/my/paprika-grammar/" />
</appSettings>

The specified directory must contain an index.grammar file.

Packaging for NuGet (note to self)

• Build in Release Mode
• Publish from VS, not Nuspec
• Go to nuget.org Upload and upload the new package from the Build directory