version 0.8.5 - Fixed a couple lingering Unicode bugs, one of which was breaking things pretty thoroughly under Python 2.2.3. - Improved whitespace handling, to the point where it should be compliant with the AIML 1.0.1 standard. Basically, whitespace will be stripped down to readable levels, unless the xml:space attribute is used to indicate otherwise. - Fixed bug in PatternMgr where the character '1' was mistaken identified as punctuation to be stripped, instead of the intended '!'. version 0.8.4: - Fixed bug in AimlParser creation, if the aiml module was not in the same directory as the script that imported it. - Improved Unicode support (again) (thanks to Daniel Kottow for his help). - 2nd pass at documentation. All functions now have useful, properly-formatted docstrings. version 0.8.3: - Reworked the way AimlParser objects are created, to allow support for XML namespaces in a future version. - First pass at Unicode-proofing the whole system, so that multi-lingual AIML files can be processed. - Added support for "index" attribute in "star", "thatstar" and "topicstar" elements (thanks to Robert D. Cotey for the patch!). Also added type-check to ensure that the value of the "index" attribute is an integer. version 0.8.2: - Added protection against infinite AIML recursion. - Removed the deprecated Kernel.getBotName and Kernel.setBotName functions. - Added workaround for Unicode input crash. Feeding the Kernel Unicode input no longer crashes the interpreter, but some internal input-formatting operations must be skipped, which could cause some nonsensical replies (like you're not already used to nonsensical replies, though...) version 0.8.1: - "system" elements now attempt to intelligently convert between UNIX-style and Windows-style pathnames as appropriate. For cross-platform compatibility, all AIML files should use UNIX-style paths inside their "system" elements. - Fixed crashes under Windows9X when a "system" element is executed when w9xpopen.exe is unavailable. - Re-piped most errors and warnings to go to stderr instead of stdout. - Fixed bug that would cause the the bot to stop responding to any input in a session if the "that" or "topic" strings were 100% whitespace (but still not empty). - Fixed bug that would cause multi-line "that" strings to become corrupted. For example, "Hello there.\nNice to meet you" would become "HELLO THERENICE TO MEET YOU" when queried for that-matching. version 0.8: - Removed support for non-standard "mode" attribute in "system" elements. It just wasn't worth breaking the AIML standard for. - Reworked persistent session support (I warned you!). The old method involving Kernel.persistentSessions() has been removed. Instead, there is a new Kernel.getSessionData() method which gives the bot author access to the session data. You can store this data however you wish. Session data can be restored later by repeated calls to Kernel.setPredicate(). - Improved AIML parser error handling; instead of aborting the entire file, a parse error now only ignores the current category and forges ahead. To check for parse errors, check the return value of AimlParser.getNumErrors() after parsing. version 0.7: - Further improved AIML parsing; missing or invalid XML attributes are now detected at parse-time. There's also a first stab at support for Forward Compatibility Mode: if the "version" attribute of an AIML tag is not 1.0.1, the parser is much more forgiving of unknown or missing XML tags and attributes. - Added "support" for the 'gossip' tag. The specific behavior of this tag is totally undefined; currently, the PyAIML implementation treats it as a big no-op. Its contents are ignored, and it returns the empty string (but at least it isn't flagged as a syntax error!) - Oops; I've implemented 'person' as 'person2' and vice versa this whole time! Swapped them back; they should each behave correctly now. - A bit of code cleanup, with an emphasis on using proper XML/AIML terminology whenever possible. - Fixed some exception-masking in the 'condition' element processor, which could prevent AIML parse errors from being reported. - Added full support for the "bot" tag (previously only the 'bot name="name"' form was supported). Bot predicates are set using the Kernel.setBotPredicate() function. Note that Kernel.getBotName() and Kernel.setBotName() have been deprecated, and will disappear in a future release. version 0.6.1: - Fixed undefined variable exception that was thrown whenever there was no match for the user's input. - Fixed an infinite recursion bug caused by processing two or more nested 'srai' or 'sr' elements. version 0.6 - Completely rewrote the LearnHandler class (which handles all AIML parsing) to be much less forgiving of incorrect AIML. Currently, any AIML errors outside of "template" elements should be caught and reported at load-time. AIML errors inside templates are still not detected until run-time. - Added support for atomic 'person' and 'person2' tags (they implicitly use 'star' as their contents if none are provided). - Oops; Kernel.respond() was DEFINITELY not thread-safe. Now it is, provided you're using Python's standard 'threading' module. If not, you'll have to provide your own mutual-exclusion system to ensure that only one thread is calling Kernel.respond() at a time. - Recursive tags ('srai' and 'sr') no longer add their intermediate results to the input and output history. - EXPERIMENTAL FEATURE: persistent sessions. If enabled using Kernel.persistentSessions(True), session data will be written to disk after every response. This lets session data be preserved when the Kernel is destroyed, at the expense of a small performance hit (all that extra disk I/O). The semantics of this feature may change in future releases! - Added support for the "id" tag (it returns the session ID). - Added support for the "topic", "topicstar" and "thatstar" tags. - Commented up the test.py file. - Added a summary to the end of the Kernel.py self-test (since there are now too many tests to fit on screen). - Added support for multi-sentence input. The user's input is split into individual sentences, each of which is treated as a completely separate piece of input. I'm *pretty* sure this is the Right Way(tm). version 0.5 - The filename inside Learn tags can now contain wildcards. Besides simplifying the loading of multiple files, this allows the possibility of loading AIML files that may not exist without crashing the interpreter. - Attempting to set the value of a predicate in a nonexistent session now automatically creates the session, instead of silently doing nothing. - "set" tags now output the new value of the variable, as well as assigning it. version 0.4.1 - Unknown AIML tags are handled in a more forgiving fashion. If an unknown tag is encountered, instead of ignoring its contents entirely, the contents are processed and returned unaltered. - Added support for "bot name='name'" tags, both in patterns and in templates. This also fixes a nasty infinite loop crash when a user says Hello to a bot. version 0.4 - Added support for "star" and "sr" tags. - Considered adding support for the "secure" tag, but decided against it. see SUPPORTED_TAGS.txt for more information. version 0.3 - Cleaned up AIML processing code to remove some unnecessary special-cases in the interpretation algorithm. - Added support for "input" and "that" tags. version 0.2 - 50% speedup in Kernel.loadBrain() and Kernel.saveBrain(). - The optional 'learnFiles' and 'commands' arguments to Kernel.bootstrap() can now be either strings or lists. This allows multiple files/commands to be loaded during initialization. - Added support for "person" and "person2" tags. - Added general word-substitution functionality. This opens up the potential for localizing PyAIML into non-English languages. See DefaultSubs.py for more info. version 0.1: - Initial release.