Andy Chase

When it comes to programming problem-solving, I usually do pretty well thanks to the internet; you can find an explanation and/or example of darn near anything if you choose your search terms carefully.

That’s usually all I need; it might take me a while to absorb whatever new technique or classes/functions I’m using, but the path is usually clear.

Once in a while, though, I’ll get stuck on one problem, and kill an entire weekend on it - because it always seems like the solution is just one more tweak away… and finally I reach the point where I just keep tweaking, not remembering why I’ve moved things around, or where they were originally.

It’s been a while, but I’m definitely in that hole tonight - I’m working on a Drupal import module, and this is one of those times when I’m critically aware of my lack of formal training when it comes to algorithms. All I’m trying to do is walk a nested array structure recursively, create new nodes from those arrays, and create nested menu items that match the structure of the array.

Sounds easy enough, but the menu part is killing me. The tricky part is handling the combination of string and numeric indexes in my array, which comes from from YAML parsed by spyc. I’ve tried changing the source document structure a couple of different ways without success. I’m trying to avoid making the structure so verbose as to defeat its original purpose.

I’ve reached the point where I will probably throw all of the problem code out the window and start over. What I really need is a whiteboard.