Quick guide to writing FiTL queries

Simple Queries

At it's very root, FiTL filters down rows based on columns and conditional statements for described columns.

Base form of a query can be described as:

For example

Which in a playlist, returns a table where in all the rows the "artist" column is equal to "JDilla"

You can inverse this statement by an "!", like:

or:

Which filters out all the songs from a playlist where the "artist" column is equal to JDilla (idk why anyone would want to do that)

Other common comparison values

Naturally comparisons are case case-insensitive. To make them case sensitive, add a "^" in front of the operation (but not before the negate value "!")

For a more rough estimate in string matching, you can do one of either two operations.

The one that you'll probably be using the most often is the "contains" operation: "=:" which instead of checking for exact matches like the "=" operation, checks to see if the column in that specific row contains the comparitive value like such:

Tip: the colon is on the side of the smaller side

The inverse of this is the "isin" operation: ":=". This checks to see if the comparison value contains the column value like such:

Combining Queries together

You can combine multiple queries together with either a "&" (and) or an "|" (or) symble

The "&" symbole is an "and" operation, meaning that both statements on each side of the "&" must be true in order for the query to pass for that row. For example:

The above statement only returns rows where the artist name is "Michael Giacchino" AND the album title contains the word "soundtrack" in it.

The "|" symbol is an "or" operation, meaning only one statement on each side of the "|" symbol have to be true in order for the query to pass for that row. For example:

The above statement returns rows where the artist is equal to "black thought" or the artist contains the string "roots" so we can filter through a playlist and get all of Black Thoughts solo catalog and also his catalog with The Roots.

If you're really advanced (or you don't touch grass), you can get really specific and add parenthesis to your queries, which work exactly like they do in math

This query returns any Roots song, or if it's a Black Thought song the album is only "Streams of Thought Vol. 1".

Add as many and nest as many parenthesis as you want. Get crazy with it, I won't care but the compiler might yell at you.

((((((((((artist = "black thought" & album = "Streams of Thought Vol. 1")))))) | (((artist =: roots)))))

Symbol Table