Tutorial

This tutorial gives a good introduction to using Clique.

First make sure that you have Clique installed.

Clique revolves around creating collections of items that all have a commonly changing numerical component. Clique itself does not care what the numerical component represents. It could be a frame index for a sequence of files or a version number in a list of versioned files.

The easiest way to create these collections is to assemble() them from arbitrary items.

First, import clique:

>>> import clique

Then define the items to assemble (could be the result of os.listdir() for example):

>>> items = ['file.0001.jpg', '_cache.txt', 'file.0002.jpg',
...          'foo.1.txt', 'file.0002.dpx', 'file.0001.dpx',
...          'file.0010.dpx', 'scene_v1.ma', 'scene_v2.ma']

Finally, assemble them into collections:

>>> collections, remainder = clique.assemble(items)
>>> for collection in collections:
...     print repr(collection)
<Collection "scene_v%d.ma [1-2]">
<Collection "file.%04d.dpx [1-2, 10]">
<Collection "file.%04d.jpg [1-2]">

Notice how the items _cache.txt and foo.1.txt didn’t form any collections (and were added to remainder). This is because _cache.txt has no numerical component and was ignored, whilst foo.1.txt resulted in a collection with only one item and was filtered out of the result.

The minimum items filter can be altered at assembly time:

>>> collections, remainder = clique.assemble(items, minimum_items=1)
>>> for collection in collections:
...     print repr(collection)
<Collection "scene_v%d.ma [1-2]">
<Collection "foo.%d.txt [1]">
<Collection "file.%04d.dpx [1-2, 10]">
<Collection "file.%04d.jpg [1-2]">

See also

There is a full guide to Assembly available.

Each collection holds various properties to describe the items it contains:

>>> collection = collections[0]
>>> print collection.head
scene_v
>>> print collection.tail
.ma
>>> print collection.padding
0
>>> print collection.indexes
[1, 2]

See also

There is a full guide to Collections available.

It is also possible to parse a string (such as that returned from Collection.format) to create a collection. To do this, use the parse() function:

>>> collection = clique.parse('/path/to/file.%04d.ext [1, 2, 5-10]')
>>> print repr(collection)
<Collection "/path/to/file.%04d.ext [1-2, 5-10]">

It is also possible to pass in a different pattern to the default one:

>>> collection = clique.parse(
...     '/path/to/file.%04d.ext [1-10] (2, 8)'
...     '{head}{padding}{tail} [{range}] ({holes})'
... )
>>> print repr(collection)
<Collection "/path/to/file.%04d.ext [1, 3-7, 9-10]">