How can I make a string with expandable keywords in Scheme?

Question

I'm writing a GIMP script to export layers to files. I want to provide a user-specifiable field where they can provide the format for the filenames to be exported, with tilde-character combinations for each element (ie. a file named "foo" with layers "bar" and "baz", with the output filename format being "~f-~l.png", would output "foo-bar.png" and "foo-baz.png"). I know how I would do this in Lua:

local nameformat = "~f-~l.png"
local function layer_export_name(filename, layername)
  return string.gsub(nameformat, '~.', {f=filename, l=layername})
end

How can I do this in GIMP's Scheme?

To reiterate: I need to replace keywords in a string. I don't need a function that creates a string I've already defined.

Answer 1

There is no standard Scheme procedure to do this. I wrote the following in-efficient but portable procedure:

(define (expand-keywords string tokens)
  (let loop ((slist (string->list string))
             (in-replace-mode #f)
             (result ""))
    (if (not (null? slist))        
        (let ((c (car slist)))
          (cond (in-replace-mode
                 (let ((token (car (cdr (assoc c tokens)))))
                   (loop (cdr slist) #f (string-append result token))))
                ((char=? c #\~)
                 (loop (cdr slist) #t result))
                (else 
                 (loop (cdr slist) #f (string-append result 
                                                     (make-string 1 c))))))
        result)))

Sample usage:

> (expand-keywords "~f-~l.png" '((#\f "vijay") (#\l "9")))
"vijay-9.png"
> (expand-keywords "~f-~l.~e" '((#\f "vijay") (#\l "10") (#\e "jpg")))
"vijay-10.jpg"

If your Scheme implementation provides a procedure to modify a string in-place, use that instead of string-append.