[Feature Request]: Extend Tier Class specification

[JoFrhwld]

What feature would you like added?

At the moment, entry class specification for textgrids allow for either a simple list that gets repeated as many times as necessary:

[Word, Phone]

Or a fully nested list pattern

[[Word, Phone], [Word, Phone], [Style]]

Some way of providing this would be useful

[[Word, Phone]+, [Style]]

What would the use case be for this feature?

When working with TextGrids that have a variable N number of speakers, and a singleton annotation tiers, this would be useful.

Would you like to help add this feature?

Yes, and I will submit a pull request soon.

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow this project's Code of Conduct

[JoFrhwld]

Maybe some kind of simple wrapper class like

class Repeat:
  def __init__(self, entry_classes):
    self.entry_classes = entry_classes

  def yield(self):
    return entry_classes

It would have to play nice with class cloning

alignedTextGrid/src/aligned_textgrid/aligned_textgrid.py

Line 183 in be4e7de

def _reclone_classes(

But it could maybe simplify extending classes

alignedTextGrid/src/aligned_textgrid/aligned_textgrid.py

Line 149 in be4e7de

def _extend_classes(

[JoFrhwld]

Problems

Greediness

[
  Repeat(custom_classes(["Word", "Phone"])),
  Repeat(custom_classes(["A", "B"]))
]

The simplest approach to making this work in _extend_classes() would repeat out the first list as many times as possible, which wouldn't leave any tiers left for the second list. By default, be greedy?

Nesting

Maybe this just shouldn't be allowed

[
Repeat([
  Word, 
  Phone, 
  Repeat(custom_classes(["a"])) 
]