http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=538603

From time to time hacking in the terminal I need some rest. One of the things I'd love then is reading a random Darwin Award.

The text seems to be pretty good hidden in the html tree, so I decided to use an empirical approach, which filters the surrounding stuff.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 1 );
   $agent->get('http://cgi.darwinawards.com/cgi/random.pl');
my $content = $agent->content( format => "text" );
my $cr = chr 169;
$content =~ s/.*\d\d\s+Urban Legend//s;
$content =~ s/.*\d\d\s+Personal Account//s;
$content =~ s/.*Reader Submission\s+Pending Acceptance//s;
$content =~ s/\s*DarwinAwards\.com\s*$cr.*//s;
$content =~ s/.*?\([^\)]*?\d{2}[^\)]*\) //s;
$content =~ s/.*Darwin\s?Award\s?Nominee//si;
$content =~ s/.*Confirmed \S+\s?by Darwin//si;
$content =~ s/.*Honorable Mentions//s;
$content =~ s/submitted by.*//si;
$content =~ s/109876543210.*//s;
$content =~ s/^\s+//;

print $content;

[download]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Random Darwin Award in plain text
by wazoox (Prior) on Mar 23, 2006 at 13:19 UTC
    A valuable replacement for your usual fortune cookies :)
[reply]
      fortune cookies? who needs fortune cookies ;-) 
      perl -MLWP::Simple -e '@_ = split/\%\n/, get(q(http://phd.pp.ru/Texts/
+fun/signatures.txt));print splice @_, @_*rand,1'

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Random Darwin Award in plain text
by willyyam (Priest) on Mar 29, 2006 at 16:35 UTC

    I quite like this, thank you. I find that not all entries have a trailing newline, so I added this to the code before the print statement: $content = $content . "\n";

    Is there a way to run fmt -72 or something similar on this text block to have it break the lines neatly?

[reply]
[d/l]
[select]
      Ah good idea. About the formatting:
      perl darwin.pl | fmt -72
      would do it.

      A perl only solution could use Text::Wrap: 
      #!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use WWW::Mechanize;
use Data::Dumper;
use Text::Wrap qw(wrap);

my $agent = WWW::Mechanize->new( autocheck => 1 );
   $agent->get('http://cgi.darwinawards.com/cgi/random.pl');
my $content = $agent->content( format => "text" );
my $cr = chr 169;
$content =~ s/.*\d\d\s+Urban Legend//s;
$content =~ s/.*\d\d\s+Personal Account//s;
$content =~ s/.*Reader Submission\s+Pending Acceptance//s;
$content =~ s/\s*DarwinAwards\.com\s*$cr.*//s;
$content =~ s/.*?\([^\)]*?\d{2}[^\)]*\) //s;
$content =~ s/.*Darwin\s?Award\s?Nominee//si;
$content =~ s/.*Confirmed \S+\s?by Darwin//si;
$content =~ s/.*Honorable Mentions//s;
$content =~ s/submitted by.*//si;
$content =~ s/109876543210.*//s;
$content =~ s/^\s+//;

print wrap("\t", "", "$content\n");

      [download]
[reply]
[d/l]

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