Ruby: Turn bash.org quotes into a fortune file

Posted on December 8th, 2005 by Sacha Chua

The following code turns XML quotes from bash.org (a popular IRC quotes server) into a fortune-cookie file. Handy for using with ../emacs/flashcard.el and my ../emacs/flashcard-config.el, which pops up a fortune every time I get a correct answer.

bash-org-to-fortune.rb:

require 'rss/1.0'
require 'cgi'
require 'net/http'
host = Net::HTTP.new('bash.org', 80)
if ARGV[0] then
   resp, data = host.get('http://bash.org/xml/?top&below=' + ARGV[0], nil)
else
   resp, data = host.get('http://bash.org/xml/?top', nil)
end
parsed = RSS::Parser.parse(data, false)
parsed.items.each { |x| puts CGI::unescapeHTML(x.description.gsub('
', "\n")); puts "%\n" }

Call like this:

ruby bash-org-to-fortune.rb > bash; strfile bash; fortune bash

# or to get the top quotes with score < 1000
ruby bash-org-to-fortune.rb 1000 > bash; strfile bash; fortune bash

On Technorati: ruby, code, programming

Save to - del.icio.us - Digg it - reddit - StumbleUpon

More posts about...: code, programming, ruby //

RSS feed | Trackback URI

2 Comments »

John Bigboote Subscribed to comments via email

Apr 30, 2008 at 8:22 pm

Looks like this no longer works:

/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rss/rexmlparser.rb:24:in `_parse': This is not well formed XML (RSS::NotWellFormedError)
Missing end tag for 'hr' (got "body")
Line:
Position:
Last 80 unconsumed characters:
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rss/parser.rb:163:in `parse'
from /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/rss/parser.rb:78:in `parse'
from bash-org-to-fortune.rb:10

Reply to this comment

Sacha Chua

May 8, 2008 at 8:37 pm

Yes, for some reason bash.org/xml gives a Permission Denied error. Try it against http://feeds.feedburner.com/latest-bash-quotes instead.

Reply to this comment

On This Day...

2007: Finding out if I'm overscheduled — If you're anything like me, your task list is long and growing, but the time you have is just as fixed. [...]

2005: Two years ago — Was it really just two years ago today that I learned that free tech support gets you so much more than [...]

2005: To write well, one must have leisure — To write well, one must have leisure: leisure to read, leisure to think, to talk things over, to talk oneself [...]

2005: Squidoo now on public beta — Squidoo opened its doors to the public today. Open beta. Try it out if you're into Web 2.0 stuff. I'm personally [...]

2005: Secret Santa exchanges the Web way — Elfster makes it easy to set up Secret Santa gift exchanges. It automates signing up, drawing people, and even anonymously asking questions. [...]

2005: From elsewhere: Linux: a social experiment — Linux advocate disguised as panhandler gives CDs away. Interesting social results: most people don't read signs, and panhandling is fairly [...]

2004: Panic, panic — MIT application coming up soon. Dec 15. Nearly forgot about it. Embarrassing, as I'm into personal information management. At least my statement [...]

2004: Demo tomorrow — Objective: Give Prof. Chignell some ideas about Planner so that he can introduce me to the wearable computing and personal information management [...]

2004: Philippine websites ranked — From the Philippine PHP mailing list: here's a site that lists the philippine's top sites by alexa. the one on cebu-online doesn't [...]

2003: Burrito attempt flop. — Writing off attempt to make burritos, as lettuce makes burrito soggy. Must figure out how to do it properly. In meantime, [...]

2003: Fortuitious events — Found my keys in pocket of khaki jacket. Extremely fortunate as discovered upon entering Ateneo that no classes meant buildings were closed [...]

2003: Training — The normal arrangement is HRD goes into a contract with the instructor, but since it's a short course, we'll just send [...]

2003: Problems with lphdisk — lphdisk does not seem to recognize my hibernation partition. Here is the output of fdisk -l /dev/hda: Disk /dev/hda: 20.0 GB, 20003880960 [...]

On this day...