I've just released the first version of another library in the collection of libraries that support the development of Rogallo: specifically, another one that helps convert text in other formats into Gemtext so Rogallo's display can be a little richer. In effect, this is a sibling to md2gemtext and html2gemtext.
This time it's a library to convert finger responses into Gemtext, where it makes sense. For the most part, finger responses are free-form plain text, but there are times when there's information in the response that would be of most use if you could interact with it. For example, if you get a user list from plan.cat1, that's a lot of data that could be turned into finger:// URIs that can be subsequently followed.
With this in mind, finger2gemtext can take a body of text, look at it to see if it might be possible to convert it to useful Gemtext, and will convert it if that's the case. Given that there's no standard to be had here, and given that any given response could be of any form the author desires, I'm making the conversion pretty conservative.
What I have done, though, is make it so that the conversion process can be extended. The finger_to_gemtext function can be given a collection of additional filtering classes; if the built-in classes can't find anything to convert, the additional classes get a go. There is a base class to inherit from.
I've not fully planned it out yet, but the vague idea I have here is that Rogallo could, at some point, have "finger plugins" which will handle various special cases and site-specific formats.
For now, though, this gives me the basics that let me turn this:
into something where I can follow finger:// links without the need to copy/paste/edit:
Now I need to find a few more online finger resources that respond with things worth making linkable...
finger @plan.cat↩