So today I set out to modify my massive unique tweet and content generator for my Netsyphon network(ie: hotel-kelowna, innkelowna.com, kelownasrestaurants.com, etc etc) and add an inline content spinner to it.  To date there are a lot of search/replaces happening but they are all one time replaces and reference external files for the replace values..  Usually there were only one or two possible s/r results per line so I could handle it easily with gsub.

But now I wanted to be able to take a single article with a ton of spinnable content and have a script generate 10-20-100 different versions of this article.  I would have a sentence where 80% of the content was spinnable with infinite amount of results.  I could handle this with the old method but it would require creating a ton of external files for each search/replace possibility which would get insane.  Instead I knew that there had to be a relatively simple method with bash to make this happen, and much to my delight the boys over at #bash on irc.freenode came to the rescue

Big props out to \amethyst and geirha, my two heroes for the day.  Some useful info from #bash as well:

FAQ: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ | Guide: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide | ref: http://tinyurl.com/txlv | http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/ | USE MORE QUOTES!: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Quote.html | Scripts and more: http://www.shelldorado.com/

And without further ado here are the scripts that were created by these two gents.

http://pastebin.com/xNgKaR2c:

FAQ: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ | Guide: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide | ref: http://tinyurl.com/txlv | http://bash-hackers.org/wiki/ | USE MORE QUOTES!: http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/Quote.html | Scripts and more: http://www.shelldorado.com/

And without further ado here are the scripts that were created by these two gents.

The first by Geirha, is setup to read from an external file , and if not will take the input from stdin

http://pastebin.com/xNgKaR2c:

spinner_thingy ()
{
while read -r -d ‘{‘; do
printf “%s” “$REPLY”;
IFS=’|’ read -r -d ‘}’ -a words;
n=${#words[@]};
((n)) && printf “%s” “${words[RANDOM%n]}”;
done < “${1:-/dev/stdin}”;
printf “%s” “$REPLY”
}

The second by\amethyst can be found here: http://pastebin.com/tAXJ04L6

I went ahead and replaced the example line at the top with a reference to a filename

line=”$(<test.txt)”
makesentence ()
{
local line=”$1″
while [[ $line = *{*}* ]]; do
local -a choices
local prefix=${line%%{*} rest=${line#*{}
local choice=${rest%%\}*}
line=${rest#*\}}
IFS=’|’ read -a choices <<< “$choice”
[[ $choice = *"|" ]] && choices+=( “” )
printf “%s” “$prefix”
if (( ${#choices[@]} )); then
printf “%s” “${choices[RANDOM % ${#choices[@]}]}”
fi
done
printf “%s\n” “$line”
}
makesentence “$line”

So there you have it.. 30 minutes in IRC and the helpful boys over at #bash have me right as rain.. Again a big shout out, these guys have been integral in helping me with all of my scripting in this project.. I would have jack if it wasn’t for them.

As a parting gift I also found a way to do this with php, but alas I wanted a shell script that I could easily integrate into the mothership so it was all one nice neat package.. But for those php guys here it is:

<?php
$text = "The {quick|slow|reasonably paced} {brown|green|blue|pink} {fox|goat|rat|camel}
{jumped|walked|hopped} {over|past|under} the {lazy|tired|boring} {dog|cat|stoat}";
$count = 0;
while ($count++ < 100){
echo Spin($text);
echo "<br />";
}
?>

Now go generate some content!

Tags: automate, bash, content, free, generate, php, script, shell, spinner