Selectors

With Fix selectors one can select which Catmandu items can end up in an output stream or not. Using a selector to throw away the records you are not interested in. For instance, to filter out all the records in a input use the reject() selector:

$ catmandu MARC to YAML --fix "reject()" < data.mrc

The command above will generate no output: every record is rejected. The opposite of reject() is the select() selector which can be used to select all the Catmandu items you want to keep in an output:

$ catmandu MARC to YAML --fix "select()" < data.mrc

The command above will return all the MARC items in the input file.

Selectors are of little use when used in isolation. Most of the time they are combined with Conditionals. To select only the MARC records that have "Tsjechov" in the 100a field one can write:

$ catmandu MARC to YAML --fix "select marc_match(100a,'.*Tsjechov.*') " < data.mrc

There are two alternative ways to combine selector with a conditional. Using the guard syntax, the conditional is written after the selector:

reject exits(error.field)
reject all_match(publisher,'xyz')
select any_match(years,2005)

Using the if/then/else syntax the conditional is written explicitly:

if exists(error.field)
   reject()
end

if all_match(publisher,'xyz')
   reject()
end