The making of programmingexcuses.sh

I recently discovered programmingexcuses.com which is a funny website displaying random excuses that we often use when confronted with a bug we didn't foresee.

I though it was a very clever idea and that it would also be cool to have it on the command line. I quickly googled it but found no result (except for this API).

So I decided to fill in this void.

First, I needed the list of quotes. I could get the page through curl easily. Next, I needed a way to extract the content from the HTML. At first I tried it with grep, sed and awk but my command line skills are still too weak and couldn't get it to work properly.

So I ran another google search to find a command line HTML parser. And I found pup which is to HTML what jq is to JSON. With pup, I could easily get the text I needed from the page.

Now that I was able to get one excuse, I needed the full list. So I ran a loop of 100 calls to the website, to get a random sample of 100 quotes.

After running the list through sort and uniq, I ended up with a list of 77 quotes, which was enough.

Here the final script that got me my list :

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

for i in {00..100}; do
  curl http://programmingexcuses.com/ \
    | pup -p 'center a text{}' \
    >> excuses.txt
done

cat excuses.txt | sort | uniq > sorted_excuses.txt

Now, I simply put the list in a simple bash script that does a shuf -n 1 on it to display a random one on each invocation.

Last step was to put that in a git repo, write a readme and push it to github.

Overall, it took me about 2 pomodoros (50mn). I love how powerful command line tools are.

Tags : #linux, #wget, #pup, #bash

Want to add something ? Feel free to get in touch on Twitter : @pixelastic