[uf-discuss] Introducing Prism: Microformat Parser and Library for Ruby

[Mark Wunsch]

I'm really pleased to announce the first minor dot release of Prism, a
new Microformat parser, library, and command line tool for the Ruby
programming language.

http://github.com/mwunsch/prism

Prism is a Microformat parser and "html toolkit" backed by the
powerful Nokogiri libxml2 parser (http://nokogiri.org). It defines a
DSL (a domain-specific language) for parsing POSH formats, and comes
included with support for several Microformats. Right now (v0.1.0) it
supports:

+ rel-tag
+ rel-license
+ VoteLinks
+ XFN
+ XOXO
+ XMDP
+ geo
+ adr
+ hCard

With support for more forthcoming.

To get started, just make sure you have Ruby installed on your system
and run `gem install prism` (you might need `sudo`).

## Using the command line tool ##

	prism --hcard http://markwunsch.com > ~/Desktop/mark.vcf
	
Go ahead and try that: you can add me to your address book. Prism's
CLI (command line interface) allows you to convert hcards to vcards
(more coming soon, of course). Type `prism` to see a general help
page. Man pages are in the works.

I urge you all to check out Prism, run it and see if it parses to your
expectations. If not, please open an issue on GitHub
(http://github.com/mwunsch/prism/issues).

Priorities for the next release include smarter handling of ISO8601,
Geo, and E.123, and passing all of the Value Class pattern tests
(http://microformats.org/wiki/value-class-pattern-tests). Following
that, I plan on focusing on getting hCalendar and hAtom support in.

Thanks for checking it out and I encourage contribution!

Thanks,
-Mark Wunsch
@markwunsch on Twitter
http://github.com/mwunsch
mwunsch on Freenode