String-Parser VS mecha

Currently, one of the things I’m using the suso.str is to get the translated (localised) names of items from an item frame. This is done partially with command blocks and partially with datapacks for reasons I’ll try to explain below:

In Java you can use this datapack to get the current time out of a player head and set the difficulty accordingly.

reading out strings, cutting them apart and analyzing them? while technically possible, it's horribly laggy resource intensive. Also not really inteded, (ab)using some bugs and such.

The community coined term for this is "string parsing" and the most up-to-date explanation is probably inside this repository: https://github.com/5uso/String-Parser you can use this technology to either parse the output string of a commandblock (which includes the current server timestamp) or to dissect a player head's texture, which is encoded in base64 and includes a unix timestamp as to when it was requested from the skin server.

To add: There already a bunch of scattered datapacks that try to provide some functionality in a sort of library-way. Some are not updated anymore, some are. The ones that I know of that come to mind would be AESTD, MinecraftPhi or this much more specialised string parser.

Contributions and feedback in general are very welcome. There's a growing community on discord. Some of the tools currently being developped under the project umbrella are mecha (https://github.com/mcbeet/mecha) and lectern (https://github.com/mcbeet/lectern). Mecha is a pluggable mcfunction parser and compiler, it implements progressive syntactic extensions like multiline commands, nesting, relative locations and implicit execute. It also comes with Bolt, a compile-time scripting engine that fuses Python into command syntax. Lectern implements a document-based authoring format for data packs that's geared towards literate programming and tutorials. It lets you embed data pack fragments in markdown and turn it into a proper data pack.