console tool for reading Hacker News

hackernews.pl

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use JSON;
use strict;
no warnings;
use HTML::Entities;

my $command = @ARGV[0];
my $home = $ENV{'HOME'};

if (not (-e "$home/.hn")) {
  mkdir "$home/.hn"
}

if (($command eq "get") or ($command eq "next") or ($command eq "")) {
  my $next = "";
  if ($command eq "next") {
    open HNJSON, "<", "$home/.hn/json";
    my $jsonstring = <HNJSON>;
    close HNJSON;
    my $json_obj = decode_json $jsonstring;
    $next = "/" . %$json_obj->{'nextId'};
  }
  my $url = "http://api.ihackernews.com/page$next";
  print "$url\n\n";
  my $jsonstring = `curl -s $url`;
  my $json_obj = decode_json $jsonstring;
  open HNJSON, ">", "$home/.hn/json";
  print HNJSON $jsonstring;
  close HNJSON;
   
  my $items = %$json_obj->{'items'};
  my $ctr = 1;
  my $title;
  my $points;
  foreach my $item (@$items) {
    $title = $item->{'title'};
    $points = $item->{'points'};
    print "[$ctr] $title ($points) \n";
    $ctr += 1;
  }
}
elsif (($command >= 1) and ($command <= 30)) {
  my $url;
  open HNJSON, "<", "$home/.hn/json";
  my $jsonstring = <HNJSON>;
  close HNJSON;
  my $json_obj = decode_json $jsonstring;
  my $items = %$json_obj->{'items'};
  $url = @$items[$command-1]->{'url'};
  if ((substr $url, 0, 8) eq "/comment") {
    $url = "http://ihackernews.com" . $url;
  }
  elsif (($ARGV[1] eq "comments") or ($ARGV[1] eq "c")) {
    $url = "http://ihackernews.com" . "/comments/" . @$items[$command-1]->{'id'};
  }
  print "$url\n\n";
  my $text = `curl -s $url`;
  decode_entities($text);
  $text =~ s/<br ?\/?>/LINEBREAKLINEBREAK/gi; # convert br tags
  $text =~ s/<\/title>/LINEBREAKLINEBREAKLINEBREAK/gi;
  $text =~ s/<\/h[1-9]>/LINEBREAK/gi;
  $text =~ s/<\/p>/LINEBREAK/gi; # convert p tags
  $text =~ s/<\/li>/  /gi;
  $text =~ s/<!--.*?-->//g; # don't care about comments
  $text =~ s/<script.*?<\/script>//gis; # don't care about scripts
  $text =~ s/<style.*?<\/style>//gis; # don't care about styles
  $text =~ s/<[^>]*>//g; # remove the rest of the tags and leave text
  $text =~ s/\t/\n/g;
  $text =~ s/\s{4,}/\n/g;
  $text =~ s/(^[\r\n]*|[\r\n]+)[\s\t]*[\r\n]+//g; # remove blank lines
  $text =~ s/LINEBREAK/\n/g;
  $text =~ s/(.{70,80})\s/\1\n/g; # add line breaks
  print $text;
}
else {
  print "usage: hn [command]\n";
  print "  commands\n";
  print "    get\n";
  print "    next\n";
  print "    1\n";
  print "    2\n";
  print "    ...\n";
  print "    30\n";
}