Tired of answering Formspring questions? Let Andrey Markov do it for you.

formspring_markov.py

#!/usr/bin/python

import collections
import random
import sqlite3
import sys

try:
    from nltk.tokenize import sent_tokenize
except ImportError:
    import re
    def sent_tokenize(paragraph):
        return re.split('[.!?]', paragraph)

class Markov(object):
    def __init__(self, corpus, splitter=unicode.split):
        self.state = collections.defaultdict(lambda: collections.defaultdict(list))
        w1 = w2 = "\n"
        for word in splitter(corpus):
            self.state[w1][w2].append(word)
            w1, w2 = w2, word
        self.state[w1][w2].append("\n")

    def __call__(self, paras=[1]):
        ret = []
        w1 = w2 = "\n"
        for sens in paras:
            para = []
            while sens > 0:
                t = random.choice(self.state[w1][w2])
                para.append(t)
                if t[-1] in '.!?':
                    sens -= 1
                w1, w2 = w2, t
            ret.append(" ".join(para))
        return "\n\n".join(ret)

def analyze(db):
    paras, sens, corpus = [], [], []

    conn = sqlite3.connect(db)
    cur = conn.cursor()

    cur.execute('select answer from questions;')
    for answer, in cur.fetchall():
        if answer is None:
            # Apparently this does happen
            continue

        corpus.append(answer)

        p = answer.split('\n\n')
        paras.append(len(p))
        for para in p:
            sens.append(len(sent_tokenize(para)))

    conn.close()

    random.shuffle(corpus)
    return "\n".join(corpus), [random.choice(sens) for x in range(random.choice(paras))]

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if len(sys.argv) != 2:
        sys.stdout = sys.stderr
        print "Usage: %s __FILENAME__" % sys.argv[0]
        print "  where __FILENAME__ is a formspringscrape database"
        print "  http://code.google.com/p/formspringscrape/"
        sys.exit(1)

    corpus, spread = analyze(sys.argv[1])
    print Markov(corpus)(spread)