For those of you who use twitter, you’ll likely recognize the separation of ‘d’ from ‘efine’ as intentional: ‘d’ means direct a message to another twitter user and ‘efine’ is the user you’re sending it to. Together I hope they connote ‘define’ because thats what they do. Sending
d efine ruby
to twitter should, if my twitter-bot works as intended, return a direct reply of
"A clear, deep, red, valued as a precious stone."
Which is a fairly accurate definition (even if it does leave out my favorite computer language).
So in this part I’ll describe the definition-grabbing piece, which queries wiktionary.org for the first definition. This first iteration is stupidly simple: read the entire page, parse its contents with the wondrous <a href="http://code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot"event_item" title="_why oh _why" target="_blank">Hpricot</a> tool, grab the first item from the first ordered list on the page and throw away any links. It sometimes gets odd or partial definitions so it will need improvement – but works great for the five minutes it took to write.
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
def efine word
open("http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/#{word}") do |f|
(Hpricot(f.read) / "ol" / "li")[0].to_plain_text.gsub(/s*[.*]/,'')
end
end
That’s all. You’ll have to wait for the twitter-integration piece in my next post. I haven’t written it yet, but given the functionality in twitter4r, I doubt it will be much longer than the efine() method above. In fact, my usual peeve about Ruby is just that: it takes longer to describe the code than to write it!