URL substitution

URL substitution is a transformation of a given URL using a set of specifications. Such specification can be provided as configuration settings (via all supported configuration sources). These configuration items must follow the naming scheme datalad.clone.url-substitute.<label>, where <label> is an arbitrary identifier.

A substitution specification is a string with a match and substitution expression, each following Python’s regular expression syntax. Both expressions are concatenated into a single string with an arbitrary delimiter character. The delimiter is defined by prefixing the string with the delimiter. Prefix and delimiter are stripped from the expressions before processing. Example:

,^http://(.*)$,https://\\1

A particular configuration item can be defined multiple times (see examples below) to form a substitution series. Substitutions in the same series will be applied incrementally, in order of their definition. If the first substitution expression does not match, the entire series will be ignored. However, following a first positive match all further substitutions in a series are processed, regardless whether intermediate expressions match or not.

Any number of substitution series can be configured. They will be considered in no particular order. Consequently, it advisable to implement the first match specification of any series as specific as possible, in order to prevent undesired transformations.

Examples

Change the protocol component of a given URL in order to hand over further processing to a dedicated Git remote helper. Specifically, the following example converts Open Science Framework project URLs like https://osf.io/f5j3e/ into osf://f5j3e, a URL that can be handle by git-remote-osf, the Git remote helper provided by the datalad-osf extension package:

datalad.clone.url-substitute.osf = ,^https://osf.io/([^/]+)[/]*$,osf://\1

Here is a more complex examples with a series of substitutions. The first expression ensures that only GitHub URLs are being processed. The associated substitution disassembles the URL into its two only relevant components, the organisation/user name, and the project name:

datalad.clone.url-substitute.github = ,https?://github.com/([^/]+)/(.*)$,\1###\2

All other expressions in this series that are described below will only be considered if the above expression matched.

The next two expressions in the series normalize URL components that maybe be auto-generated by some DataLad functionality, e.g. subdataset location candidate generation from directory names:

# replace (back)slashes with a single dash
datalad.clone.url-substitute.github = ,[/\\]+,-

# replace with whitespace (URL-quoted or not) with a single underscore
datalad.clone.url-substitute.github = ,\s+|(%2520)+|(%20)+,_

The final expression in the series is recombining the organization/user name and project name components back into a complete URL:

datalad.clone.url-substitute.github = ,([^#]+)###(.*),https://github.com/\1/\2