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.

You can also find a backup version of the Life lexicon here

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, 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 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 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 names
• 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