Yup, I’m wee bit of a Linux sysadmin kinda nerd and I do a lot of stuff in Perl, which is a very dense language that I wish I had never picked up, but hey, it is excellent at text processing.

The original idea went like this: save a template to a text file, read it, perform replacements, and then write that modified copy to the clipboard. The original version was just that, not too complicated. Off the top of my head, the meat of it is something like this (pseudocode):

copy="";
for line of readlines filename
  for key in table
    line=line.replace(/\b${key}\b/,table[key]);
  copy += line + "\n"

Basically, you find key within the template and expand it to the corresponding value in the table, which is just JSON, eg:

const table={
  "--lighting":"text describing lighting"
  "--background":"text describing background"
  // and so on
}

But then I realized that for a character, I would need more than one item. So that means this thing needs to work recursively, that is to say “–character” would have to be an object, which has to be converted into a string that can be put into the template…

Similar story if, for instance, one element references another. Maybe you replace “–background”, but the text for it contains a reference like say “–time-of-day” or something. So you have to do multiple passes, until there is nothing left to replace.

Anyway, I hacked it together in a very absent-minded kind of way without a clear plan so now it’s completely unmaintainable lmaooo.

It is OK as a prototype, the good thing it has is that once you define an object and save it to the “database” (in my case, just a bunch of text files saved on my disk), you can reference it anywhere else. I’ve been using it to write character sheets a lot, and that kinda bridged the gap between T2I and text gen, I just write a new object referencing other objects in the database (facial features, hair, clothing, personality traits, et cetera) and boom, that’s a fresh character I can insert into a scene.

Think of it like playing with dolls, maybe? You comb their hair, have them try out new clothes, and then give them a batmobile :DD and once you define what the batmobile looks like, you can place it anywhere else. Something like that.

I think that it’s a very good fit for Perchance, and since Javascript is more or less just a well-adjusted Perl the translation work isn’t too challenging. The only real concern is planning the project a little bit better so I don’t turn it into spaghetti twice.