Something for y'all to pick the bits out of...

A reply from @WorkflowHQ on Twitter contained the following...

"Also regarding sending images, Workflow can decode base64 encoded images."

Does this help us here? Can we encode images base64?

All this talk about iCloud illustrates one of the reasons why I'm not looking for a "write to file" solution.

Clipboard would be fine, though "trashing" the clipboard should only be done if necessary. It seems that it is.

To reveal a little more of the picture...

... My idea was to create a graphing Pythonista capability so Workflow might pass a CSV (file) into Pythonista and then do something with the graph (image) returned.

In essence I wanted to add graphing to Workflow. I would expect Pythonista would be a good way to do it.

Would Editorial do this better than Pythonista?

Thanks to all.

Workflow can have an image passed in to a "stage" in its pipeline. And I think it can have a stage output one.

While OK on the clipboard or persistent file front I wondered if the Pythonista stage could ingest and emit images directly.

Those of you who use Workflow know it can handle images.

Any idea how a Pythonista "stage" in the pipeline might pass an image back?

I've not tried it but 1Writer claims javascript support. Some people might like that: http://1writerapp.com/docs/js

Playing Devil's Advocate: What would this bring over existing IDE's on Mac?

Thanks to everybody for your responses so far.

I like the dictionary idea and @ccc had a particularly good thought in terms of stages being in a file, perhaps new line separated.

@ccc I'll be in touch with you during the week as you emailed me. For those who don't know, we both work for IBM - which has a positive stance on Open Source but some governance around it.

I would like to allow the user of a progam I'm developing to create a pipeline of stages, probably separated by the | character (or a replacement). They would pass this text string to my program.

For example:

fred.txt | takeLines 5 | takeColumns 3 | makeHTML | fred.html

These are not the real stages and I probably haven't got the Unix file handling syntax quite right but bear with me, please.

Has anyone done this? And do you know of any modules that make it easy?

The pipeline is probably going to be invoked by:

1. Command line parameters when running (from the console?)

2. As part of an iOS extension.

I'm not sure if there are any gotchas or if I can get any help with parsing the stages.

I also can tweak the syntax. If I can't use | within the input string I could choose something else; I don't mind much.

One thing I'm sure of is I don't want to have the pipeline invoke multiple Pythonista programs. The data is too cumbersome to keep parsing and externalising at each stage. Or, put another way, it would introduce unnecessary inefficiency.

Thoughts?

Not to try to answer your question but just to observe you're (mostly) using a large bold font in this post.

Only the code snippets are normal. I don't know if you can edit the post but anyway...