# lilex

> Parses Life Lexicon to JSON and JavaScript

## The Life lexicon

The Life Lexicon

> ... is a lexicon of terms relating to John Horton Conway's Game of Life.

The latest versions of this lexicon (both HTML and ASCII) should be available from the [Life Lexicon Home Page][life-lexicon].

You can also find a backup version of the Life lexicon [here][life-lexicon-backup]

## Why?

I was looking for sources of patterns for a Game of Life side project, and I ended up finding the [Life Lexicon Home Page][life-lexicon], which is an amazing on-line resource of all-things Game of Life. I started copy pasting pattens and writing small scripts to convert them into consumable JSON data, and at some point I decided I wanted them all.

There are several download formats for the Life Lexicon. The [plain text ASCII version][life-lexicon-ascii] is very regular and easy to parse and that's the reason why I chose to work with it.

## Requirements

Download and expand the [plain text ASCII version][life-lexicon-ascii] of the Life Lexicon. Once expanded, you will end-up with a directory with the following files:

```
lex_asc
├── README
├── emacs.txt
├── lexicon-clean.txt
├── lexicon-small.txt
├── lexicon.txt
└── lifelex.el
```

The file that you need to use is `lexicon.txt`.

## Lilex

Install

```
npm install --save @grancalavera/lilex
```

Import

```
import lilex from '@grancalavera/lilex'
```

`lilex` is an array with the 866 terms of the Life Lexicon. Each term is an `Object` with the following properties:

- `name`: `String` the name of a given term
- `period`: `Number` or `undefined` the period of a given pattern
- `description`: `String` the description of a given pattern
- `links`: `Array` of `String` an array of related term `name`s
- `width`: `Number` the width of a given pattern
- `height`: `Number` the height of a given pattern
- `pattern`: `Array` of `[Number, Number]` an `Array` of coordinate pairs `[[x,y]]`, representing alive cells in a pattern


## CLI

```
npm install -g @grancalavera/lilex
```

```
lilex <path>                      Parses the Life Lexicon and renders it
                                  as JSON to stdout

lilex <path> --format [json|js]   Changes the output format

lilex <path> -json                Parses the Life Lexicon and renders it
                                  as JSON to stdout

lilex <path> -js                  Parses the Life Lexicon and renders it
                                  as an ES2015 JavaScript module to stdout

lilex --help                      Displays this message
```


[life-lexicon]:http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/lex_home.htm
[life-lexicon-ascii]:http://www.argentum.freeserve.co.uk/lex_asc.zip
[life-lexicon-backup]:https://github.com/elgrancalavera/lex_asc