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Cool project! One of my earlier projects for learning Scheme was a similar system whose selling point was automatic "smart" ingredient substitution. It's intere
by jakear 6y ago
Cool project! One of my earlier projects for learning Scheme was a similar system whose selling point was automatic "smart" ingredient substitution. It's interesting that one of the key selling points of this is it's focus on quickness of search. I can't imagine having so many recipes that a computer would have a hard time searching through them, but then perhaps I'm just not the target audience :)
Aside: I know everyone loves to hate electron/web tech, but being an electronician myself, I can't help but wonder how a web-tech version of this would look. For one, it would be nice to be able to try this out, but the current version is unavailable on my platform (MacOS). An Electron or web version wouldn't have this problem, and a web version would work with an iPad or similar, which is a nicer kitchen tool than any keyboarded-device in my experience. Potential hanging points would be in parsing the recipes, and search. I'd imagine that for search it wouldn't be all that difficult to build up a sufficient index programmatically without mySQL, but I could be wrong. As for parsing, the examples I've seen seem all quite simple, but of course the difficulty in parsing is always the long tail.
- wedesoft 6y agoNot sure about Electron. You would probably still need the parser to be Flex/C for performance. Even using Flex and C it takes about half an hour to import 250000 recipes. Sorry that I haven't done a build for MacOS. But I don't have a system for testing.
- jakear 6y agoAny chance that recipe dump is available online anywhere?
- wedesoft 6y agoThe thing is, I don't have the copyrights. I just downloaded the recipes from Glen's MealMaster archive and imported it. But MealMaster is human readable text if you just want to look at the data.
- jakear 6y agoThanks, found the archive but looks like the “140,000 more recipes” link is dead. How did you deal with the ambiguity in representation of ingredients? For instance, looking through some examples it seems like an ingredient description can continue onto two lines, and that is indistinguishable from an ingredient followed by an ingredient with no measurement. Ed: also, do you intelligently deal with the “or” clauses in some ingredient lists? It seems their syntax is ill defined as well.
- wedesoft 6y agoI am not sure which link you mean. Glen's Mealmaster archive is here: http://thehoseys.org/buster/recipes.html http://thehoseys.org/buster/recipes.html
- wedesoft 6y agoAn ingredient continuation line has to start with a "-". Otherwise the software can't recognise it. There is no intelligence in the parser.
- jakear 6y agoInteresting, a quick manual parse suggests that would work for a majority of cases, but there is definitely a sizable minority of recipes playing fast and loose with formatting.